Political / Economic News and Commentary

May 16, 2011

Below is a May 15, 2011 article in 9/11 Truth News. The official 9/11 Commission report is unraveling. Pakistan strikes back, the Obama administration is slapped in the face.

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Death of Bin Laden May Distract from a More Disturbing Story

by Hossein Turner

On the evening of May 1st, US president Barack Obama publically announced that Osama Bin Laden had been killed in a “firefight” as a result of a successful US military operation in Pakistan. Several discrepancies in the public story surrounding his death have since been pounced on by internet conspiracy theorists, some claiming that the US raid was fake as well as arguing that Bin Laden apparently died years ago. Such theories are not possible to prove and really serve as petty distractions from more important issues concerning Al Qaeda. One can clearly argue, however, that Bin Laden was never indicted for the crime of 9/11 by US authorities, even though he was always regarded as a suspect. The media has lately referred to him as the “mastermind” of the attacks, when in actuality it is Khalid Sheikh Mohammed who has been officially named the mastermind, despite controversies regarding the reliability of his testimony and the nature of his role. More importantly, however, the role of the Pakistani Inter-Services Intelligence agency (the ISI) may well be even more significant than those of Osama Bin Laden and Khalid Sheikh Mohammed.

US counter-terrorism official John Brennan recently told the media that Bin Laden had apparently been living in his prominent Abbottabad home for five to six years and that “he was in contact with some senior al Qaeda officials”. US Senator Carl Levin said that the Pakistani army and intelligence agencies have serious questions to answer about how Bin Laden managed to live so close to the central location of the Pakistani army for apparently so long. The Pakistani authorities have hit back, claiming that they warned the US about the Bin Laden compound two years ago. This has created considerable tensions between the US and Pakistan – tensions which really hide a darker and more troubling history that connects certain former employees of the Pakistani ISI with members of Al-Qaeda and the 9/11 hijackers. These former employees have not been officially regarded as 9/11 suspects by the US authorities.

On the 22nd of July 2004, United Press International reported that “On the eve of the publication of its report, the 9/11 Commission was given a stunning document from Pakistan, claiming that Pakistani intelligence officers knew in advance of the 9/11 attacks”. The report also alleged that the Pakistani ISI provided direct financial support to the 9/11 hijackers and was thus fully involved in the plot. Worryingly, the final report of the 9/11 Commission failed to mention this allegation, and barely refers to the ISI agency at all. Since 9/11, Pakistan has become an ally in the “war on terror”, an ongoing war that has also been continued by President Obama. Pakistan has received a lot of financial aid in the years since 9/11, amounting to approximately $20 billion dollars . This aid comes despite reports that elements of the Pakistani government, including the shadowy ISI, have been supporting and aiding the Taliban in Afghanistan. The counter-productive nature of this policy seems clear – yet it continues, despite the protestations of certain US officials. The issue of financing the Taliban may be bad enough; worse than this, however, are compelling allegations that point to the ISI directly providing money to the September 11th hijackers even as the CIA continued close ties with the agency.

In September 2006, former Pakistani president General Pervez Musharraf stated that the US official Richard Armitage threatened to bomb Pakistan “back to the Stone Age” during a conversation with Pakistan’s intelligence director. The alleged threat was made in the days following the 9/11 attacks and were apparently made as a consequence of Pakistan’s not choosing to participate in the “war on terror”. Ties to the Taliban were apparently severed – albeit only temporarily- by the Pakistani regime as a response to these alleged US threats, and this was met with approval by the Bush regime, who welcomed them as their new partner.

But serious questions remain about the involvement of the Pakistani authorities in the support and financing of Al Qaeda. The Family Steering Committee (FSC) of the 9/11 Commission was a group of 9/11 family members who spear-headed the campaign for the creation of the Commission to investigate the attacks, and who assisted the commission staffers with their work as well as monitoring them. On their website there remains a list of questions which the final report of the Commission failed to address or answer. In the case of the Pakistani ISI, some of the questions refer to the former Director of the agency, General Mahmood Ahmed. According to several media reports, the General was meeting with US officials in Washington between the 4th and 13th of September 2001. The FSC asked the 9/11 Commission to inquire about the details of the meeting with General Ahmed conducted by the House and Senate Intelligence Committee chairmen on September 11th. More importantly, they also asked the Commission if they could find out why the General ordered Ahmed Omar Saeed Sheikh to wire $100,000 to the 9/11 hijacker Mohamed Atta. This may seem like a serious allegation, even speculative – but it is no conspiracy theory. In June 2004, the New York Times reported that Lorie Van Auken, a member of the Family Steering Committee, “was irate” that the final report of the 9/11 Commission did not even mention General Mahmoud Ahmed’s alleged role in the $100,000 wire transfer to Mohammed Atta. Disturbingly, in 2006 the Pakistani newspaper The Friday Times published a report claiming that lobbyists from Pakistan gave thousands of dollars to members of the 9/11 Commission in order to try and get them to omit any information from the final report that might be damaging to the Pakistani authorities. This could perhaps explain why the 9/11 report does not address allegations against former members of the Pakistani ISI, especially that of General Mahmoud Ahmed and Ahmed Omar Saeed Sheikh.

The story of Saeed Sheikh is also highly compelling. He is currently being held in prison in Pakistan for the murder of US journalist Daniel Pearl. He was originally sentenced to death for this crime back in July 2002, but he has since been kept alive and was even accused of plotting the death of General Musharraf from his jail cell in 2008. He has been linked not only to Al-Qaeda and the Taliban but also to the Pakistani ISI. In 2002, according to the online archive History Commons, the New York Times, India Today, the National Post and The Guardian newspapers all reported that Saeed Sheikh was working for the ISI and was well known to senior officers there. Several media reports have also detailed Saeed Sheikh’s close ties to Al-Qaeda, particularly from late 1999 to 2001. For example, Vanity Fair reported in August 2002 that Osama Bin Laden referred to Saeed Sheikh as “my special son”. On the 30th of September 2001, the Daily Telegraph reported that Sheikh had even apparently trained some of the 9/11 hijackers. In his 2003 book Inside Al Qaeda: Global Network of Terror, author Rohan Gunaratna wrote about how Sheikh was able to establish an Al-Qaeda network in Dubai. Interestingly, several 9/11 hijackers arrived in Dubai between the 11th of April and the 28th of June 2001 – according to US officials – and purchased several travelers’ checks. It was from this location in August 2001that Saeed Sheikh was alleged to have sent Mohammed Atta $100,000, which ended up in two of Atta’s accounts in Florida. If Saeed Sheikh had an Al-Qaeda base in Dubai at the time, it is also possible that he could have been in contact with the hijackers when they passed through. Regarding the money transfers to Mohammed Atta, an unnamed senior US official told CNN in October 2001 that “U.S. investigators now believe Sheik Syed, using the alias Mustafa Muhammad Ahmad, sent more than $100,000 from Pakistan to Mohammed Atta”. In January 2002, the Press Trust Of India reported that the Indian authorities had informed the FBI that ransom money obtained by the Dubai mobster Aftab Ansari (in order to release a captured Calcutta businessman) was used to finance Mohammed Atta. Indian authorities named Ahmed Omar Saeed Sheikh as the paymaster who provided Atta with $100,000 via wire transfer. A wide range of world news media reported on the link between Atta and Omar Saeed Sheikh. Unfortunately, the story of the wire transfer has been largely buried and obfuscated by the Western media since the end of 2001.

On October 7th 2001, General Mahmoud Ahmed was demoted from his position at the head of the Pakistani ISI. The official reason was because he was apparently too close to the Taliban. However, the official reason is not credible especially given the fact that the remaining ISI officials continued to maintain their ties with the Taliban. On June 20th 2004, a member of the 9/11 Commission told the Los Angeles Times that before 9/11, Pakistani officials were “up to their eyeballs” in collaboration with the Taliban and Al-Qaeda. Yet, General Mahmoud Ahmed and other members of the Pakistani authorities were apparently only threatened by the US authorities if they refused to become partners in the “war on terror”. Was General Ahmed sacked because of his decision to order Saeed Sheikh to wire money to Mohammed Atta? If so, it is a great injustice to have the General remain free in Pakistan with no charges on his head. Saeed Sheikh remains in a Pakistani jail, but like the General he too has not been formally charged with suspicion of involvement in the 9/11 attacks. Perhaps the US authorities should seek to question these two men, rather than just kill them and ask questions later, as they did with Bin Laden. More importantly, there should be hard questions directed at the US authorities and the 9/11 Commission with regard to the way they have dealt with the ISI before and after 9/11. For the US authorities to simply threaten or scapegoat Pakistan now would be a grossly irresponsible act, since certain agencies of both governments have a lot of explaining to do.

May 11, 2011

The case of Susan Lindauer, arrested under the Patriot Act in 2004 is in serious need of publicity. Those Americans who continue to live in the aura of fear thrust upon us by the George W. Bush administration have to realize that the Patriot Act is an abhorrent abrogation of citizen rights guaranteed by the Constitution of these United States. The case of Susan Lindauer clearly demonstrates that fear of our own government may be of more relevance than fear of supposed terrorists. The lawless Bush administration should have made it clear to all that the protections placed in our constitution are necessary for our protection in the pursuit of life, liberty and happiness.

A Time for Truth:Bin Laden's Death Won't End War on TerrorUntil Americans Understand the Threat was Always Us

By Susan Lindauer, 9/11 Whistleblower

Some of our leaders think Americans don't need the truth about 9/11 any more, because Osama's dead and it's over.

As somebody who got brutalized at "ground zero" of the 9/11 cover up for most of the past 10 years, I could not disagree more. I'm sick of asking for a proper Congressional investigation. Congress already knows the truth about 9/11. That's why they're not poking around. However, it's a huge mistake for the rest of us who know the truth, or parts of it, to wait for permission to speak. America has trapped itself in a mythic nightmare about terrorism that exaggerates our enemies, while our leaders manipulate our sense of patriotism and effectively blind us to mistakes in national security policy. It's not a successful policy if it weakens our country.

The United States has reached a tipping point when we have to consider the end of the "American Age." In which case, an honest examination of 9/11 becomes imperative. Americans must understand 9/11, so that we can puncture the creepy bubble around the War on Terrorism, and sweep away the phony threat that's got all of Washington plotting Wars in the Middle East, bankrupting our economy with runaway defense spending, and tearing down civil rights in the name of national security.

Thirty days after I spoke with top staffers for Senator Trent Lott and Senator John McCain, the FBI showed up with a warrant for my arrest.

To those others I say, they cannot silence us if we refuse to give up our voice. I challenge Congress to put our country on the right track by holdings hearings on 9/11 to take our testimony. I will gladly swear to all of the following under oath:

The truth is that our team, which triangulated the CIA and Defense Intelligence Agency, discussed the 9/11 attack in its exact scenario and time frame throughout the summer of 2001. We talked about it practically every week at our meetings. We also discussed it on the telephone, pointedly joking "Hello NSA! Pick up the phone--" knowing the National Security Agency had wire tapped my lines.

There's no question that the story of the 9/11 conspiracy was planted months in advance to prep the intelligence community for the government's reaction. And it unfolded exactly as they told us it would--with a little help from an orphan explosives team. That will be explained in a second article. The two are not contradictory.

Before we get to that, Americans must first accept the motivation for 9/11, and why the U.S. government allowed it to happen. This was a Pearl Harbor Day. And it achieved an agenda, which was already well defined.

From the first moment that I was told about 9/11 in April and May of 2001, I was informed that the United States planned to declare War on Iraq immediately when 9/11 happened. The two were already linked as cause and effect.

I can testify to that absolutely, because I was the Asset commanded to deliver those threats to Iraqi diplomats at the United Nations. I was instructed to say the "U.S. intended to declare War on Iraq if Baghdad failed to provide actionable intelligence to stop the conspiracy involving airplane hijackings and a strike on the World Trade Center. We would bomb Iraq more aggressively than ever before--back to the Stone Age."

As the primary back channel to Baghdad from 1996 through 2003, I delivered that message with all precision from April and May right through August 4, 2001. I can pinpoint the day, because the conversation with my CIA handler took place on the day of the Senate confirmation hearings for Robert Mueller's appointment to head the FBI.

Let me be clear: The threat was not vague or undefined. We fully expected airplane hijackings and some sort of aerial strike targeting the World Trade Center, specifically. No other target or location was ever discussed.

"Extreme Prejudice" reveals a truth that's very different from what America has been told. I challenge Congress to put me under oath and rip me with questions. Americans have the right to hear my direct testimony, which would disclose a complete chronology of our advance discussions about the conspiracy, in addition to our considerable efforts to stop the attack.

Unbeknownst to the public, from the opening days of the Bush administration in January 2001, our team had begun hammering out a comprehensive framework for achieving all U.S. objectives, including weapons inspections, so that the U.S could claim a major victory while ceding to pressure for the U.N. sanctions to end. Anti-terrorism was a central part of our peace framework. In fact, Iraq had agreed to invite an FBI Task Force to conduct terrorism investigations by February, 2001. The CIA had also won Iraq's consent for major reconstruction contracts for U.S. corporations in telecommunications, hospitals and health care, transportation--- and oil. Everything the U.S. wanted was ours for the taking. And the CIA wanted it all.

When my CIA handler, Dr. Fuisz informed me on August 2 that the 9/11 attack was in play and considered "imminent," he and I together resolved to take more aggressive action to prevent it.

I'm not telling you what somebody else did that I heard about later. I'm telling what actions I took myself in "real time" to try to stop the 9/11 attack.

On Monday, August 6, I reported to Dr. Fuisz after my trip to New York. I told him that Iraqi diplomats had thrown up their hands. They had nothing to give us. Yes, they assured me, Baghdad was fully aware that Iraq faced a threat of full scale war, if a 9/11 style of attack occurred. They understood that it would be in their greatest interest to provide us with any fragment of intelligence to help stop the attack. They understood that 9/11 would complicate our peace framework exactly at the moment when the international community was ready to throw off U.N. sanctions. Bottom line, they had nothing to give us.

I was an unusual party to this discussion, motivated by deep antipathy for sanctions and war. For those reasons, I informed Dr. Fuisz that I felt super motivated to do everything in my power to stop 9/11, both to protect the people of New York City and to prevent an unnecessary War--exactly at the moment when our team was completing this outstanding peace framework that achieved all U.S. objectives.

At the instructions of Dr. Fuisz on August 6, I personally placed phone calls to U.S. Attorney General John Ashcroft's private staff at the Justice Department on August 7 or 8.Identifying myself as the CIA Asset covering the Iraq and Libya Embassies at the United Nations, I personally requested that Ashcroft's Office post "an emergency broadcast alert across all agencies, seeking any fragment of intelligence on airplane hijackings, with a known target of the World Trade Center." I described the attack as "imminent," with the potential for "mass casualties. I asked for maximum inter-agency cooperation and urged that any information be forwarded to the CIA immediately.

There was still plenty of time for action to pre-empt the attack. Americans have a right to know how top leaders in government handled our warnings, and effectively thwarted those best efforts in August of 2001.

There was a lot of action that August--including a second set of events that I would learn about years later, involving an unidentified orphan team that would lay explosives in the Twin Towers. My next article will explain how those two conspiracies converged. Contrary to what the 9/11 Truth Community supposes, these two operations do not cancel out each other.

But first Americans must understand that 9/11 was a "stand down" operation, a true Pearl Harbor Day, meaning that U.S. and foreign intelligence understood what was coming. The leadership at the top of the U.S. government made an active decision to let the attack go ahead--- because the decision was already made that 9/11 would provide a pretext for War in Iraq. With peace breaking out in the Middle East at that very moment, the War Party required a massive scale threat to overturn the peace process. Clearly they decided that nothing would be allowed to interfere with that objective.

Once that factor's understood, 9/11 becomes comprehensible.

Some of my testimony would surprise America--like efforts by Saddam Hussein's government to guarantee Iraq's complete cooperation with global anti-terrorism efforts before and after 9/11. That will be addressed in another article.

Finally, my book, EXTREME PREJUDICE provides a full scope of the brutality by the Justice Department to silence me and other Assets, using the Patriot Act as a weapon to guarantee the success of its deception. (A hint: Assets watched the cover ups of 9/11 and Iraq on prison television. And I wasn't the only prisoner).

Oh it wasn't all bad! My CIA handler got $13 million tax-free from emergency appropriations for the 9/11 investigation in November, 2001--- He built himself a grand mansion a stone's throw from CIA headquarters in McLean, Virginia. Not a dollar or a dime got spent on 9/11. Mind you, the government's not complaining. But shifting tax dollars away from Iraq's cooperation with the 9/11 investigation took food off my table. I paid a terrible price for it.

All parts of the 9/11 warnings, the cover up-- the arrests and pay offs-- should disturb Democrats and Republicans alike who brag about their leadership support for Assets engaged in anti-terrorism. It makes a lie of their pledge of loyalty, for sure. And it denigrates their performance as stewards of national security, which ought to be a litmus test for the 2012 Campaigns. Those who don't care for the people's business don't belong in government.

Simply put, democracy requires accountability to the people. Americans have a fundamental right to possess the truth about 9/11 and the decision to declare War on Iraq months before the attack--because national security does matter in this age. Americans require that knowledge, so as to assess the leadership performance and quality of policy making on our behalf.

Good leaders don't have to be afraid. Bad leaders should be sent packing for the betterment of government.

Most alarmingly, 9/11's legacy has proved detrimental to the security of our country. According to the National Journal, fighting this phantom demon of terrorism today involves 1,271, government agencies, producing 50,000 intelligence reports a year that for the most part, nobody reads.http://news.yahoo.com/s/yblog_exclusive/20110506/pl_yblog_exclusive/the-cost-of-bin-laden-3-trillion-over-15-years Meanwhile, "black budgets" for intelligence operations have mushroomed to $75 billion a year, financing both domestic and international surveillance that monitors law-abiding citizens across the country. There's no federal auditing authority or Congressional oversight over "black budgets." It's all tax free and unregulated. It's a secret government gone wild.

Osama's death has been a great victory for the CIA. But it will not bring U.S. soldiers home from Iraq and Afghanistan, where military operations have cost $1.6 trillion and counting. It won't end the nonsense War against Libya, which has no justification at all.

Osama's death will not quash the planning stages for future wars against Syria, and God help us, Iran.

Is it really patriotic to stay silent while the military industrial complex devours our economy for its own profits? Without producing benefits for U.S. soldiers? Admiral Mullen, head of the Joint Chiefs of Staff doesn't think so. He has described America's national debt as "the greatest threat to our national security."

Our country is teetering on the abyss. If we're going to succeed in restoring the great traditions of liberty and moral authority, we've got to relearn the history of 9/11.

We must acknowledge the real threats to our quality of life are not "out there." They start right here. And those threats are perpetuated by the myths that our leaders invented that tragic morning.

The next article in this series will show how the detonation theory fits hand in glove with the airplane hijackings and aerial strike on the World Trade Center. Americans will see why the two are not contradictory at all..

Susan Lindauer was a U.S. Asset and one of the very first non-Arab Americans indicted on the Patriot Act, accused of acting as an "Iraqi Agent" for opposing the War. She was imprisoned on Carswell Air Force Base for a year without a trial, while the U.S. government reinvented Pre-War Intelligence and the success of anti-terrorism policy, which had been the focus of her work. She has written 5 articles.

April 26, 2011

China has announced that instead of buying our debt , our Treasuries, it will transfer money to it’s Sovereign Wealth Fund. Instead of buying our debt they will buy our country. Our country is being offered up for sale as I write, privatizing our services and assets is the Republican/bankster methodology for taking over this country, it is occurring at an accelerating pace. You will pay for “everything”; you will pay for access to the nations highways that your tax dollars have already paid for, you will pay for the water coming from the water systems that your tax dollars have already paid for and China is now poised to get in on the act that up to now has been the domain of the American monopolistic corporate conglomerates. I have said for over two years now that your mortgage and rent payments will be made out to China. The fire sale is on, the public commons exist no more, and don’t forget about Saudi Arabia. The American pie is all set to be divvied up, it is shrinking so the free for all is set to begin. How big a chunk will you be bidding for. China is poised to blow our doors in.

Once again for the third time in two years a multi-national summit was held in China about dropping the Dollar as the world reserve currency. There will be major repercussions for the U.S. when, when not if, this happens. The train is going to crash, the day of empire is gone and from now on out it will be sinking us. But imperial reach stretches out further and further, insanity proves to be our forte. Proud Americans will cling to empire but they had better quick acquire scuba tanks. Breath bubble bubble, breath bubble bubble; it will be hard to sing “My Country Tis of Thee” submerged. To eat; what eat, the Republican polluting machine has killed the oceans already, there will be no taking a swipe at a fish with your tongue.

A major depression is under way, there will be a major restructuring and the question is; are we going to be Mussolini’s Italy or are we going to be FDR’s New Deal which by the way kept us safe into the eighties until the deregulation that is now rampant started. Deregulation is the root of our present woes, government does have it’s place despite what the Republicans/conservatives have to say.

Record corporate profits, bank and corporate bailouts, ever rising CEO salaries and bonuses; God, why can’t I find a fool like half this American public? The working class are the wealth creators of this nation, they always have been while the rich capture the bounty. High taxes belong to the rich, we gave them the opportunity to lift the wealth off of our backs. Now they crash the middle class and buy up our assets at fire sale prices, and not even a thank you, just a kick in the teeth. The American people made the wealthy class and they kick us in the teeth and move our jobs overseas and hide their profits overseas, they are through with us, off to use and abuse foreign others.

Tax the wealthy, this is where the money is. They understand that, their attention and greed has always focused on “where the money is”. America’s “entitlement” programs are sinking us according to them but are they ever anxious to take over these “entitlement” programs. That is how you get to skim off the top, control it. The game is rigged and too many people are eating the Republican carp rammed down their throats. Rhetoric, and a masterful rhetoric at that, is the Republican forte; framing the debates in their terms so that, shall we say, the less astute among us instinctively shrug their shoulders and say “huh, that makes sense”.

Tax the rich, prosecute the banksters, JOBS, and don’t forget real 911 investigations is all that we want to hear. Nationalize the FED, end government by debt. We have some momentum starting to build, if the apathetic among us would add their weight to the swinging pendulum we can achieve a just society guided by a non-corrupt government with “of the people, by the people and for the people “ as an honest motto we can all be proud of, imagine an America we can ALL be proud of again. It is up to us to wake the apathetic, to make them wonder what all the furor is about! Fascism or FDR or our present monopolistic capitalism. It is time to end extortion politics for the sake of a better life for all.

I am having a hard time picturing myself saying "Master may I approach the gates". Personally, I am about ready to slam my fingers in the door so that I can’t pull my hair out........... Bush…Cheney; Hangman where are you???

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Ann Richards: on Bush "He was born on third base and thinks he hit a tripple "

April 22, 2011

After an unwelcome hiatus, I am back. Readers of this blog will note that I make an effort to keep you updated as to the status of bank failures in this country. I do this because we are all familiar with massive bank failure and the stock market crash of the Great Depression or more accurately, the Republican induced Great Depression. Bank failures have a direct influence on your prosperity and are an undeniable barometer of just how healthy our economy is in reality despite the government, mainstream media and corporate hype.

There are 7650 commercial banks in the U. S., the top ten have $11 Trillion out of $13 Trillion in total banking assets. This is a very important statistic as the failure of small and medium sized banks have less of an influence on the economy as the failure of even one large bank. Many banks are insolvent, being allowed to keep two sets of books that allow them to ignore their real estate problem while crossing their fingers and hoping the foreclosure crisis will end. It will not end any time soon, 2014 is the most optimistic forecast of the bottoming out of the foreclosure crisis. I have even read of ten to fourty year duration of our real estate woes. I will keep away from the political aspects of foreclosure and banking in this post, there is plenty of time for that in future posts. Deceptive government figures can only hold back reality for so long.

The statistics are:

- In the five years before 2008 only 11 banks failed.

- In 2008 25 banks failed.

- In 2009 140 banks failed.

- In 2010 157 banks failed.

- So far in 2011 34 banks failed .

- According to the FDIC, over 700 banks remain at risk of failure.

Bank of America, according to a B of A inside source is splitting off into two banks, one for the "good" assets one for the "bad" assets, the ratio of good to bad is the figure that I want to know. What are the other big banks doing? Probabally the same. This is not a good sign, it tells us that the banks know the future without having to resort to the reading of the tea leaves, it tells us they are seeing "reality" and trying to minimize the damage and most probably setting themselves up for a justification for their next round of bailouts by the Federal Government.

Bernake's QE II has been a failure and is supposed to end at the end of June, the banks are preparing for no QE III but they will probably get it. The Quantitative Easement programs are a continued bailout to the banks, it has done nothing to ease unemployment as it was described to do. All it has done is put cash(printed cash) on the books of the banks for the appearance of record profits and the increase of CEO salaries and bonuses. The only place "green shoots" are growing is in bank vaults and the soil they sprout from is contaminated.

We are in a deflationary depression and by the end of the year this will become aparent to anyone with eyes and ears.

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Update April 30, 2011..............From Has the Great American Apocalypse Begun?

by Richard Clark

On 60 Minutes, analyst Meredith Whitney, who accurately predicted the global credit crunch, predicted that up to 100 MAJOR American cities are likely to go bust THIS YEAR!

The likelihood of this new banking crisis is so explosive, Washington is doing everything in its power to keep it under wraps. It's so hush-hush, the Treasury has deliberately spread blatant disinformation about the strength of our banks. Time after time, Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner and his associates have announced that US banks are "out of the woods" and "gaining strength."

The truth is, however, that the FDIC has a list of banks that are on the brink, and that list is growing by leaps and bounds. However, the FDIC refuses to reveal the names of those banks. Those names are THE best kept secret in the financial world. Insiders, however, have told Martin Weiss that they include Bank of America, Citibank, Wells Fargo, SunTrust, Regions Bank, and Capital One. Altogether, more than 2,000 US banks and thrifts are approaching insolvency.

Thom Hartmann: " Western European countries such as France, Great Britain, Germany, Belgium, Norway, Finland, Ireland and Italy all showed higher productivity rates than those of the United States in the two decades of 1970-1990, yet all had much higher income taxes, particularly on the most rich. "

September 4, 2010

Don't Look to Washington for Help

Rule by the Rich

The Democrats were destroyed as an independent party by jobs offshoring and so-called free trade agreements such as NAFTA. The effect of "globalism" has been to destroy the industrial and manufacturing unions, thus leaving the Democrats without a power base and source of funding.

Obama and the Democrats cannot be an opposition party, because Democrats are as dependent as Republicans on corporate interest groups for campaign funding.

The Democrats have to support war and the police state if they want funding from the military/security complex. They have to make the health care bill into a subsidy for private insurance if they want funding from the insurance companies. They have to abandon the American people for the rich banksters if they want funding from the financial lobby.

Jobs offshoring is too profitable for U.S. corporations for Obama to be able to save American jobs and restart the broken economy.

Americans are being squeezed out of health care not only by the loss of job benefits, but also by corporate takeover of medical practice from physicians. Today medical doctors are wage slaves of corporate health providers that leverage doctors by turning them into supervisors of physician assistants, lower paid people without medical degrees who perform the services that doctors once provided. As neither doctor nor physician assistant has any independence, there is no one to represent the patient’s care against the profits of the corporation.

Even environmental concerns are being used to create "cap and trade" rights to buy and sell the ability to pollute. Wall Street is licking its lips over a new source of leveraged derivative instruments.

The American public cannot even get reliable information about their plight as the "mainstream media" has been concentrated into a few corporate hands that do not permit independent reporting. The media is as dependent on corporate money as are politicians.

How can President Obama restart an economy that has been moved offshore? Millions of manufacturing jobs are gone, as are millions of jobs for college graduates, such as software engineering, Information Technology--indeed, any intellectual skill the product of which can be conveyed via the Internet. Even those intellectual skill jobs that do remain in the U.S. are filled increasingly by foreigners brought in on work visas.

The enormous damage done to the U.S. economy by jobs offshoring, work visas, and financial deregulation cannot be offset by government stimulus plans, which expand the debt burdens that are crushing Americans. The federal government’s massive budget deficits and the Federal Reserve’s easy monetary policy are setting the stage for an inflationary depression to follow a deflationary depression.

The Federal Reserve chairman says not to worry about inflation, because the Fed can take the money back out of the economy. But can the Fed take the money out without contracting the economy?

Corporate money, corporate power has this government and you in a strangle hold that for three years now you have felt chocking off the life's blood of our economy, namely your money. There was a day when there were strong labor unions to stand up to the excesses of corporate power but those days are gone, there are but a few remnants of labor's power to be snuffed out. I have become perplexed in the last few years, American's have become convinced that unions are not in their best interests. Unions and the GI Bill after WW II are responsible for the expansion of a great middle class in this country. Fourty and thirty years ago a family with one income could afford a home, health insurance, and send the kids to college. This was the American dream, it was attainable, it was common, it was a good life and all a person had to do to was work to attain it. As corporations profits rose and corporate consolidation in the halls of government increased, a corporate greed for ever increasing rates of return on investment took hold and today the American Dream has become just that, a dream. Tax laws skewed towards the rich adds towards the hopelessness of the middle class decline.

Labor unions are the force to push back against corporate over step that leaves you begging for a living wage, begging for crumbs while those same crumbs get smaller. The American public embraced WalMart and the American public sealed it's own fate, it has slashed it's own throat. The public had better realize that organizing through labor unions is the start of a long push back to reinstate the self respect, integrity and decent life of the American worker. The rich have declared the start of class warfare, if you do not fight, crumbs are all you will ever have. There is plenty of money, the rich are sitting on it after you have given your labors to establish them as a dominant class. You do realize that it cannot be left this way.

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Thom Hartmann: " Everytime government of,by and for We the people is pushed out of administering some part of this nation's vast commons, corporations step in. And by swamping the United States with so called "tax cuts, " they seek to force an increasingly desperate government to cede more and more of our commons to their corporate rule. "

July 24, 2010

﻿David Michael Green is a professor of political science at Hofstra University in New York, he is fast becoming my favorite writer. Once again saying it perfectly from the pages of http://www.opednews.com/ is David Michael Green.

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Our Impoverished Politics

By David Michael Green

The other day I went looking for a quote from a civil rights speech that John Kennedy had given during a critical moment of American history, as the National Guard was called out to escort two black students enrolling at the University of Alabama. I found the passage I wanted and then went ahead and read the entire speech. It was fairly stunning.

Consider some of the following excerpts:

I hope that every American, regardless of where he lives, will stop and examine his conscience about this and other related incidents.

We are confronted primarily with a moral issue. It is as old as the scriptures and is as clear as the American Constitution.

If an American, because his skin is dark, cannot eat lunch in a restaurant open to the public, if he cannot send his children to the best public school available, if he cannot vote for the public officials who will represent him, if, in short, he cannot enjoy the full and free life which all of us want, then who among us would be content to have the color of his skin changed and stand in his place? Who among us would then be content with the counsels of patience and delay?

We preach freedom around the world, and we mean it, and we cherish our freedom here at home, but are we to say to the world, and much more importantly, to each other that this is the land of the free except for the Negroes; that we have no second-class citizens except Negroes; that we have no class or caste system, no ghettoes, no master race except with respect to Negroes?

We face, therefore, a moral crisis as a country and as a people. It cannot be met by repressive police action. It cannot be left to increased demonstrations in the streets. It cannot be quieted by token moves or talk. It is time to act in the Congress, in your State and local legislative body and, above all, in all of our daily lives.

It is not enough to pin the blame on others, to say this is a problem of one section of the country or another, or deplore the fact that we face. A great change is at hand, and our task, our obligation, is to make that revolution, that change, peaceful and constructive for all.

Those who do nothing are inviting shame as well as violence. Those who act boldly are recognizing right as well as reality.

The first thing that's striking about this rhetoric and a fact which makes the second observation all the more notable is that it comes from a president who was just barely decent on civil rights issues. Kennedy was young, handsome, eloquent, witty, martyred and canonized by his camp after his assassination, and Americans therefore remember him as a much more successful president than he actually was. More importantly, we give him more credit than is due for his moral courage on issues like civil rights, perhaps the single most important domestic question of the era. (In this respect, it must also be said that two other less-than altruistic motivations leap off the page as you read this speech: the national elite's concern, in the context of the Cold War, about how racism was hurting American efforts to win over hearts and minds in the Third World; and white America's palpable fear of black violence boiling over in response to unyielding racism.)

Kennedy was in fact behind the curve of history in many respects. Brown versus the Board and the Montgomery bus strike had already occurred seven years before his inauguration. And yet he was reluctant to move anywhere on this issue much past where events on the ground pushed him. This is understandable in crass political terms, given that the Solid (white, racist) South at that time was still a huge chunk of the Democratic Party's coalition, and given that Kennedy had won election in 1960 by the barest of margins (in fact, it took the generosity of a whole lot of people in Illinois who, despite being dead, nevertheless voted for him to put him over the top).

But that's just it Kennedy's reticence on civil rights is understandable in crass political terms, but only in those terms. Nobody in our political class likes to hear blunt truth, especially on matters of character, but let's boil this one down to just that: JFK was, in his political calculus, balancing the prospect of a second presidential term for one very privileged single American, on the one hand, versus the equality, aspirations and dignity of one-tenth of the country's population, plus the moral and Constitutional integrity of the entire nation, on the other. And, by and large, he was too often choosing to put his own interests over the country's.

All that said, look again at his words. The second reason they are striking and my real point here has to do with the moral power and eloquent clarity of his call to Americans to form a more perfect union. Yes, Kennedy was a flawed president (which, of course, makes him part of a mighty big club), and yes his deeds frequently failed to match the power of his words. But that in fact underscores my argument even more emphatically: Back in the day, even weak presidents could articulate a national vision that was vastly larger and more appealing than anything we remotely aspire to today.

Think about it. Since Jimmy Carter was in the White House, America has been a captive of regressive politics, including that of Democratic presidents and congressional majorities. The only passionate rhetoric you are ever likely to hear in our political discourse nowadays is some bald-faced lies about the urgent need to go to war or to slash taxes on the wealthy. When was the last time anyone spoke out with a moral vision about the environment, civil rights, the American addiction to war, economic justice, or the due process of civil liberties?

It happens, but it is rare in our rhetoric generally, and even more rare amongst our political class. Remember when Robert Byrd denounced the Iraq invasion in passionate moral terms? That episode sticks out precisely because it was such an unusual act. And even that was not done by a president, congressional leader, cabinet member or senior statesman. The speaker was just a senator. Not that senators aren't prominent figures in American politics, of course. But at any given time there are a hundred of them. And that just covers one half of one branch, constituting one-third of the American government.

The truth is that American political discourse in our time has been dumbed down, cheapened, emasculated and impoverished. It is Exhibit A in the case arguing that, if America was ever once a great country, it is not now. We are instead, today, a crouched and fearful giant. We don't lead in the world, other than to lead the regressive opposition (along with countries like Somalia and Libya) to virtually every form of international law and morality. At home, we have two political factions: those who emphatically and aggressively seek to turn the clock back on every form of progress achieved these last decades, centuries and even millennia, and those who sheepishly and timidly defend the status quo, or perhaps favor regressing a bit more slowly. You can see this clearly in the contrast between take-no-prisoner presidents of our time like Reagan and Lil' Bush, versus the hopelessly cowardly Clinton or Obama. You can see it on the Supreme Court. The regressive faction is bold and aggressive. The others on the Court are milquetoast moderates, merely trying to hold the line on existing policy. And, despite all the bullshit rhetoric about balance and fairness and yadda-yadda, Neither Bill Clinton nor Barack Obama would dare nominate a true Warren Court-style progressive to the bench, giving the Court even a single liberal, up against five reactionaries.

No wonder our politics are so bereft of stirring moral rhetoric. We are consumed with the smallest politics of the most narrow self-interest. Our electorate hasn't had a generous tendency in ages, and our political class is populated by careerists, on a good day.

Elena Kagan is a good example. So is Barack Obama, or John Edwards or Harry Reid or Dick Gephardt (now a leading lobbyist) and so many others. (I don't even bother to mention figures from the right, including those like John McCain, once dolled-up by the media and his own campaign rhetoric as some sort of patriot who places country before self.) Look across the political landscape and see if you can spot a Daniel Ellsberg or a Paul Wellstone or even a Lyndon Johnson anywhere on the horizon of our political class somebody who (even with the enormous other flaws in the latter's case) takes a principled stand on any great issue of our time, and who is willing to risk something of personal value to do so. You won't. It's as rare today as the Catholic Church doing the right thing about pedophilia.

What's perhaps most astonishing about all this is we live in a moment where even self-interest could simultaneously be both the right thing to pursue and politically popular. Even if politicians can't transcend their own bloated cravings for money, power and attention to stand up for repressed gays or shrinking glaciers, couldn't they find it within themselves to look out for the interests of tens of millions of Americans (who just happen also to be voters) suffering under tremendous economic anxiety and worse? What the hell is wrong with Barack Obama as a politician and as a person that he doesn't savagely excoriate the sickening monsters of the GOP who oppose extending unemployment rights to "lazy" Americans living on the very edge of survival, and thereby along the way also earn some much-needed moral and political credit for doing so?

This week saw the ignominy of the Shirley Sherrod case, in which regressive hitman Andrew Breitbart blasted across the media a doctored up video of a speech the black former director of the Agriculture Department's Georgia state office gave, decades ago, talking about how she transcended her own impulses to discriminate on the basis of race. Transcended, I say again. But that was the part that got edited out. It was as if you lost your job because you said publicly that "I am not a terrorist", but some right-wing freak (whose parents evidently neglected him as an infant and we're all paying for it still to this day) took out the third word of the sentence and gave the rest to your boss and wife and kids and everyone else, and now you've lost your marriage and family and home and job and no one will talk to you anymore. All because maybe you voted Democratic or something.

What this illustrates for the umpteenth time (as if the Brooks Brothers Riot, or what Saxby Chambliss did to Vietnam vet Max Cleland, or the character assassination of the Swiftboat thugs didn't make this crystal clear already) is that the scum that is today the American right will absolutely say and do anything in order to score political points, while so-called progressives say and do nothing even to stop their crimes, let alone to advance a positive agenda. They do nothing, that is, unless crumpling up like frightened kittens in a thunderstorm counts as doing something.

The distance traveled from Lyndon Johnson and Martin Luther King (or even John Kennedy) to Barack Obama represents a stunning collapse of empire. Once a powerful country that could, with partial justification, boast of leadership in the moral sphere, we have today shrunken, literally and figuratively, to a nation of Newts looking for some kind of cheap Rush.

For better and, unfortunately, sometimes for worse, this is a country that used to have big aspirations. Now we're like a two-bit drunken banana republic, thrashing about in the gutter of history as we implode from the toxic combination of greed, stupidity, indolence and hubris.

We once used to conduct a war on poverty. Now we just incarcerate the impoverished. In privately-owned, for-profit, jails, no less.

We once used to take care of our aged and elderly. Now our big social programs legislation does little more than redirect huge masses of taxpayer funds to corporations.

We once cared about promoting equality. Now when Oliver Stone makes the movie Wall Street in order to offer a cautionary tale about the perils of greed, a hundred thousand new stock trader careers are launched instead, in proud emulation of Gordon Gekko.

We used to be serious about protecting the air we breath, the water we drink and the land we live on from the ravages of pollution. Now we standby and watch with our hands in our pockets as we toast an entire planet to a lethal crisp.

We once used to explore the boundaries of what civil liberties could be sustained in sprawling industrialized democracy. Now we race to legislate them away as fast as we can, while the state ignores "guaranteed" protections of privacy or due process whenever it wants to, anyhow.

We once used to race to the moon, pushing ourselves to do the impossible. Now we just stick dynastic disasters of DNA dice like George W. Bush before a podium to haplessly call for a yawn-inducing, focus-group scripted, mission to Mars.

We once used to care about how we were perceived internationally, even as we nevertheless too often displayed the belligerence of our power. Now we don't even bother with the former, while we've raised the latter to a high art.

We once used to come together as a whole country to address threats and shared national concerns, all of us making enormous sacrifices toward a common purpose. Today, our presidents encourage us to go shopping.

Is it any wonder that our political rhetoric is so uninspired today? It's the perfect representation of our impoverished moral spirit.

And it's likely to bite us hard in the not-too-distant future, if it isn't doing so already.

It's been nearly half a century since JFK so aptly reminded us, "Those who do nothing are inviting shame as well as violence. Those who act boldly are recognizing right as well as reality."

Thom Hartmann: " There is much discussion of what the floor on earnings should be - the minimum wage - but none about the ceiling. That's largely because since Raegan's tax cuts there has effectively been no ceiling, and those who control the vast wealth in America are happy to have Americans fight over "How poor is too poor?" just so long as nobody asks "How rich is too rich?". "

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Bank Failure Update: We are now at 103 failed banks in 2010, 7 banks went down on Friday alone. Get ready, the dominos are going to be falling faster.

July 19, 2010

The odds do seem to be stacked against us as a working class people. Unemployment rates approaching The Republican Great Depression levels, hard working Americans losing their homes at appalling levels with no end in sight, a wayward Supreme Court handing corporations the equivalent of person hood with all of a citizens constitutional rights to use unlimited dollars to actually abrogate citizens rights, a government in partnership with a mega oil corporation to conceal and evade the financial responsibilities associated with what is most likely the most devastating ecological disaster of our time....do I go on?....I can but the point has been made. Lets add one more, the Republican meme that "you cut taxes and the tax revenues increase"; George Bush Sr. called this one "Voodoo policy" but it is being rammed down our throats by conservatives and the Democrats have become too timid to challenge this meme with any sense of force that strikes the ears of the American people. Democrats keep the hot potato in the air! The American people , even having not taken Economics 101, are smart enough to know that the government needs a reliable funding source. The pie in the sky Republican bullshit cannot be defended by anyone with a half a brain, oh but the morons try. You the American people are supposed to be stupid, you are called "sheeple" by most of the right wing bloggers; you are not stupid, you just have an affinity to not think in depth on political matters, it is complicated yes but despair now will have you twiddling your thumbs and telling the guy next to you twiddling his thumbs about the things you had, the life you had the plans you made...the past.

The future is about giving up or reversing this mess that we find ourselves surrounded in. "Surrounded in" is the accurate expression, as reality hits us in the face it will build with an intensity, a frequency that will familiarize one with the new meaning of daily life after thirty years of a hoax that led us to believe that there were underling fundamentals supporting our economy while a bubble grew and damn it, it has burst. Fundamental supports, what fundamental supports? I picture George Bush always saying "the fundamentals are strong", God I wish I could have been standing next to him once when he said that, with a Croquet ball. I have always envied Muntadhar al-Zaidi, A hero to me, Iraqis and I would hope most Americans, too bad he missed.

The following is an aptly titled article conveying just one of the new realities as we forge onward through the twenty first century.

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PUTTING IT IN REVERSE

By Bruce K. Gagnon

Part of the street I live on here in Bath, Maine has been torn up for several weeks. When a road is not resurfaced properly it has to eventually be rebuilt. That is what is happening across the nation as local and state governments, currently in fiscal crisis, don't have the funds for proper road maintenance.

All across the country the road repair bills are mounting up to the point many communities are returning them to gravel. In Spiritwood, North Dakota residents report seeing ducks floating in big potholes in the road.

In Michigan, at least 38 of the 83 counties have converted some asphalt roads to gravel in recent years. Last year, South Dakota turned at least 100 miles of asphalt road surfaces to gravel. Counties in Alabama and Pennsylvania have begun downgrading asphalt roads to cheaper chip-and-seal road, also known as "poor man's pavement." Some counties in Ohio are simply letting roads erode to gravel.

Rebuilding an asphalt road today is particularly expensive because the price of asphalt cement, a petroleum-based material mixed with rocks to make asphalt, has more than doubled over the past 10 years. Gravel becomes a cheaper option once an asphalt road has been neglected for so long that major rehabilitation is necessary.

Some experts caution that gravel roads can be costlier in the long run than consistently maintained asphalt because gravel needs to be graded and smoothed. A gravel road "is not a free road," says Purdue University's John Habermann, who organized a recent seminar about the resurgence of gravel roads titled "Back to the Stone Age."

These are just small examples of how America is literally falling apart as our Congress funds two endless wars in the Middle East and Central Asia and continues to increase military spending for an already bloated Pentagon.

Until the public begins to make these links and demands that the politicians cut war spending then we will continue to see a decline and reversal of life here in America.

The U.S. is no longer #1 in most indicators of the good life. But we just might be #1 as the country in quickest decline - we are witnessing the Third Worldization of America.

July 4, 2010

Below is part of a commentary on this American quagmire by Ed Encho, His eloquence is on a definate par with David Michael Green's interpretations of this comic book senerio that is todays reality. I urge you to read the complete article.

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Fourth of July on the Great American Lemming Farm

Diary Entry by Ed Encho

The Fourth has taken on an especially loathsome and menacing nature in 2010 that has been metastasizing like a cancer through this sickened society since the American Reichstag fire of September 11, 2001 and has confirmed for all time the words of Sinclair Lewis about fascism being delivered wrapped in the flag. The Teabaggers will be out in force this weekend, armed to the teeth and plotting their revolution or to those who are knowledgable of historytheir American Gladio. They will bray for the blood of the hated Muslims, Commies and Libruls [sic] in between stuffing food into their rancid pieholes, belching beer and singing God Bless America. That much is a given.

Yes, my friends, I have been away far too long and much has gone on that I have not been on record about, the one thing in Der Heimat that is consistent is the decline, the descent into morbid obesity, indolence, wrath and just plain dumbness has if anything since that helicopter hauled away George W. Bush like so much garbage only gained momentum.

We here in between the shining seas have other wars to worry about that have more urgency than the lost war in Afghanistan. I primarily refer to the lopsided class war during which the state uses the full power of the militarized police to ensure that the upwardly redistribution of wealth continues. The ballyhooed Wall Street/Financial Reform bill is nothing more than a rotten, rigged and borderline criminal defense of the big banks whose Gordon Gekko worship and chronic gambler mentality have effecively nuked the entire global economy. What will remain of this travesty by the time that the bumbling boob Obama finally signs it will be the proverbial band aid on the sucking chest wound. The derivatives casinos will continue to hum along, there will be only the illusion of any sort of change that helps the average peasants and the stage is being set for the last catastrophic economic blowup of all time. The next one will be where the pigs retreat into their stocked and heavily fortified compounds, install a buffer zone of militarized police and private security thugs and then let the poor dumb bastard rabble rip each other's throats out in what will be something of a cross between The Road Warrior and the savage battle for the last can of Milwaukee's Best at a teabagger July 4th bund rally. The end is coming people and you all would do best to prepare yourselves for it by stocking up with canned food, water, batteries and guns with plenty of ammo. You are going to need to hunker down and try to survive while the less prepared are out beating each other into pulp with whatever they can find to use as a bludgeon. Do you really think that the average American a**hole is cognizant enough of anything on any sort of a level where they are able to comprehend the implications of a Malthusian level catastrophe? sh*t, during my time away from blogging the primary topics of conversation and news coverage all were about the exhuming and raping the corpse of poor Natalee Holloway with the story of some Dutch degenerate named Joran Van Der Sloot. It's what works here in Murka, keep the monkeys fascinated with these idiotic lurid scandals while the entire f*cking world collapses. Next up, Van Der Sloot will be trotted out on CNN, FOX and MSNBC as the latest suspect in the long-running Jon Benet Ramsey child murder case...that is if the shameless sequel to the great Clinton blowjob inquisitions involving the alleged semen stains of Al Gore doesn't swallow them whole. So take my advice, these stupid bitches and bastards likely don't have enough food in their refrigerators to get them through half a week let alone a prolonged collapse in the social structure. Food, Guns and Ammo....you will thank me for this advice one day.

Lastly, since I have already been rambling on extensively today I will keep it short I am going to keep with the cheery news in that the speed of the collapse could be escalated. I speak of the colossal environmental disaster in the Gulf of Mexico courtesy of British Petroleum with a big assist to our corrupt American style of Capitalism that continues to worsen by the day. There is really no accurate way to assess the magnitude of this catastrophe, the media is only being given bits and pieces of the bad news - not that the suckers of the corporate and government elite would bother to report the f*cking truth anyway. This is going to be a long term, life-altering event and there has been little to no mention of what is going to happen when one or two hurricanes roar into the gulf, pick up all of the toxic goo and deliver it inlands with 120 + mph winds and a massive storm surge. Think that New Orleans was devastated by Hurricane Katrina (ok, it was the chronic inability of anyone to build a modern levee system that magnified the damage) just wait until a heavily populated area is not only torn to bits by a savage storm but all of the property, vegetation, roads and other infrastructure, personal property, vehicles and animals wake up covered in oil sludge and deadly chemicals. That is coming and that is what the government is NOT telling anybody about. I don't blame this all on Obama though, the gutting of the environmental protections began long before he found himself enscsonced upon the throne. Sure he has dicked aroud by coddling the corporations and his decision to not only retain corrupt officials (see Tim Dickinson's great Rolling Stone article The Spill, The Scandal and the President) and playing nice with BP, probably due to the fact that they are a huge supplier of fuel to the Imperial U.S. military but at least he isn't practicallyblowing BP executives like the fascist Republican a**holes in Congress are doing,retrogradegoons thelikes ofJoe Barton of Texas (where else?) but it is stillone more of the inexcusablemassivefuckups on his watch.

So what now? I seriously considered wallking away from all of this sh*t forever for a good while because as I mentioned once before there is a chronic inability in America to hear the truth. The whole sh*ttin' shebang is all going to collapse anyway no matter what I do. I am pushing 50 now and given my lifestyle over the years have at best and realistically (optimistically too) around 25-30 years left on planet sh*t. I have no kids so I really don't give a rat's ass about anything other than getting out of here before the worst hits, just run out the clock you know. But I just can't, damned as I may try to just stop caring, not that I am any great lover of humanity or anything, truthfully, I really dislike most people, they are stupid, selfish, mean-spirited and vain, they are believers in the most ridiculous things. Things like serious change, peace and justice in our time, that America is a great nation, exceptional and unlike every other empire in history that murdered, enslaved, pillaged and stole the resources of those of lesser strength, superstitious hogwash like the bible and worst of all faith in the wondrous economic system that is American Capitalism. I do not suffer fools kindly and Christ knows that I am seriously outnumbered by them. A grim sort of resignation is what I have and a serious case of revulsion and outright contempt for the majority of Americans. I can proudly say that I am ashamed to be an American so all of the flag swaddled, Becked up f*cksticks can go out and gorge themselves on potato salad and patriotic nonsense this weekend, they deserve each other.

Leo Tolstoy: " The time is fast approaching when to call a man a patriot will be the deepest insult you can offer him. Patriotism now means advocating plunder in the interest of the privileged classes of the particular State system into which we have happened to be born."

Once again David Michael Green concisely states the sad condition right wing politics has left this country in, leaving us a with a conclusion that sadly defines electorate reality. The history of these times are going to read like a comic book to future generations. If you are not into the reading, at least read the last four paragraphs.

How on Earth Did This Happen?

Living the Regressive Dream

By DAVID MICHAEL GREEN

Let’s be honest: We live in stunningly, jaw-droppingly, ridiculously absurd political times.

Here’s the story in a nutshell: A far-right predatory overclass has spent the last thirty years undoing the hard-fought gains of the mid-twentieth century, which had produced a robust middle class and vastly more economic and social justice in America than the country had ever known before. These regressives used every kind of deceit imaginable to persuade unsophisticated voters to choose candidates whose real agenda was to assist their plutocratic puppetmasters in fleecing the very same people who voted for them.

Such candidates ran on issues like the death penalty, immigration, bogus wars, gay marriage and abortion. But what they really were about as legislators was exporting jobs to where workers are dirt cheap and politically neutered, crashing organized labor, shifting the tax burden onto the mass public, deregulating industry to allow unhindered profit-taking on the upside and socialized public responsibility for risk on the downside, and locking in a Supreme Court majority that would never blanch at even the most outrageous rulings enhancing corporate power in American society.

If the product of this slow and silent coup wasn’t so bloody and so ruinous to so many lives, you’d really have to hand it to these guys for their political acumen and patience. It took a while, and it required the building of a broad and robust infrastructure, spanning from mainstream media to talk radio and TV to think-tanks to Congress, the presidency and the judiciary, to the GOP and now to the Democratic Party as well, but they have pretty much completely succeeded in grabbing all the levers of power in our society. They dominate its discourse entirely, and they have been almost completely successful to date in securing all the elements of their legislative, regulatory and jurisprudential agenda, at least to this point (how far they ultimately intend to go isn’t clear – the US as Honduras, perhaps? – but it’s unlikely to be pretty). Perhaps the only major exception to that rule was their 2005 failure to privatize the vast pool of public money sitting in the Social Security coffers, which they lust over lasciviously, like teenage boys inhaling online porn by the bucketful.

The product of these efforts has been precisely what one would expect. Corporations and economic elites have grown fantastically more wealthy than they already were thirty years ago. Their tax liabilities are now negligible and sometimes less than zero. Massive national debt, the product in part of those tax gifts to the rich, plus huge bills for interest on that debt (this alone is one of the largest items in the federal budget each year), is now owned by the mass public, who got nickels and dimes worth of tax cuts, in exchange for which they will now have to literally work years of their lives to pay down the taxes the rich escaped. Working people across the country get less and pay more for everything today. College is becoming increasingly out of the financial reach of average Americans. The minimum wage, which actually often isn’t the minimum, is far from a sustainable salary for one person, let alone a family. As of 2004, the richest one percent of Americans possessed sixty percent of all wealth in the country, while the bottom forty percent accounted for a whopping two-tenths of a percent. Between 1979 and 2004, after-tax income for the top one percent of Americans rose by 176 percent, while for those in the bottom 20 percent that figure rose only six percent. And those figures are for six years ago, during what by current standards was flush times for working people. Now jobs are disappearing, with the inevitable effect of driving wages down further, not to mention all the obvious effects on prosperity, security, health, mental health and sheer longevity.

Meanwhile, just the approach to regulation alone has produced three monstrous attacks on American society as a direct result. First the recession-starting-to-become-a-depression and all its devastation, then the recent mining disaster, and now BP’s WMD attack on the Gulf Coast states. What all of these have in common is a government regulatory apparatus that over time transitioned from a public service mission into deference to those supposed to be regulated, and then from deference for the corporate sphere into constituting a straight-out satellite office of the corporations themselves, literally having business supposed ‘regulatees’ fill out their own monitoring forms in pencil, to be inked in later by the planted shills in government. Hundreds of thousands of Americans have been wiped out by these actions and the public is paying for its own thrashing through bail-out funds. I’m sorry, but in what sense is this not treason?

Okay, so far so bad. Nothing particularly Alice-In-Wonderlandy or especially novel about rampant greed, is there? But what’s really bizarre to the point of being becoming a fully hallucinogenic experience that really should come under the supervision of the Controlled Substances Act is the effect that this has had on politics. Could there ever be a moment when right-wing ‘economics’ have been so thoroughly and manifestly repudiated? Could there ever be more overt examples of corporate greed gone nuclear? Could the repercussions of these policy decisions ever more clearly have wrecked the lives of economically insecure ordinary Americans?

No, no and no. All this is as obvious and predictable as sunrise. And yet... Here we find ourselves in this remarkable and remarkably absurd position where the folks who not only created this monster, who not only have worked assiduously to prevent any solutions to the destruction they’ve wrought, and who now also promise even more of the same – these very folks are poised to win resounding electoral victories in November. And the folks who will be voting for them will once again become victims of their predations. And the folks in Congress and the White House they’ll be voting against – supposed socialist-fascists (whatever strange Janus-faced zoological beast that would look like if it actually existed) – are in fact just about the most pro-plutocrat government imaginable. But they’re going to get stomped by voters for being socialists.

How on earth did this happen?

Well, to start with, it happened because it was intended to happen. As described above, this is the product of a broad, concerted and patient effort by the radical right to capture and control American government, and it has worked remarkably well, especially when one considers the sheer amount of deceit required to pull it off. It’s like trying to sell a cocktail of Dirt Drink mixed with Sawdust Soda to a man dying of thirst. But it can be done, and we know that because the process is now all but complete. When even John McCain refers to Congress “the best government that money can buy” you know you’re really hurting, pal. As for that Trotskyite socialist in the White House, well he’s staffed his economic team directly out of Goldman Sachs’ boardroom, he bails out mega-banks one hundred cents on the dollar without even requiring that they loan money, he wrote a health care bill that forces thirty or forty million Americans to buy a product from bloated thieving insurance companies whether they want it or not, and he has dramatically increased spending on an already astonishingly distended military, while remaining essentially silent about (meager but essential) unemployment benefits right now in the process of terminating for millions of Americans. Yeah, baby – that socialist. “Workers of the world unite” is definitely what they rap about at White House cabinet meetings. Geithner, Summers, Gates – all those revolutionary syndicalists can’t talk it up enough. Then they sing “The Internationale”.

Clearly, the political branches of the US government have been fully captured by monied elites. Perhaps scariest of all, however, is the newly emboldened ultra-radical majority on the Supreme Court (that description is not reckless hyperbole used for effect – look at what they’ve done in cases like Bush v. Gore, Ledbetter and Citizens United, and watch what they do in the coming years – it will be astonishing in its scope, radicalism and hypocrisy). After decades of histrionic lies about supposed objections to judicial activism (what they really hated was the impudent offense of an elite court handing down liberal decisions and siding with mere mortals in American society, period), they have now kicked out the jambs to expand the practical definition of the ‘activism’ term beyond all recognition. Lori Blatt, former attorney in the Solicitor General’s Office, put it best: “They are fearless. This is a business court. Now it’s the era of the corporation and the interests of business.” No case underscored this tendency better than Citizens United, of course, where the regressive majority was so blatantly activist that they literally told the stunned litigants to go home, come back in a month and reargue the case around a far, far bigger question than was at stake for the parties involved, and then sweepingly cast aside long existing law in order to blow blitzkrieg-size breaches in the barriers that had previously controlled corporate influence of elections. The only case that can rival this one for utterly transparent activism seeking a regressive outcome is Bush v. Gore, in which the right-wing bloc simultaneously violated three of their own cardinal tenets – judicial restraint, states’ rights, and hostility to civil rights principles – in order to require vote counting be stopped (say what?!) and to crown the mentally deficient dauphin as king. It could hardly be clearer that the Roberts Court ominously completes the troika of the right-wing governmental coup.

But there are other reasons we’re in this state, as well. Think about Barack Obama and the Democrats for a second, and then try applying Ms. Blatt’s phrase, “They are fearless”, to those folks. Now pick yourself up the floor. Change the underwear you just soiled from laughing so hard. Wring out the hanky you just soaked from sobbing so relentlessly. Part of why we’re in this mess is that Democrats wouldn’t know what guts looked like if they were all board-certified gastrointestinal surgeons. But, of course, to complain that “the people’s party” lacks sufficient courage of their convictions assumes that they have any. The good news is that they do, as a matter of fact. The bad news, however, is that those convictions can be reduced neatly down to two: serving themselves and serving the nice folks who donate money to get them elected. It’s a bit of a problem when the gang who are meant to protect us from the crimes of the GOP are nearly indistinguishable from Cheney’s thugs, apart from stylistically. Democrats are happy to give you a little kiss on the cheek before they screw you. Republicans prefer to just get on with the assault.

Then there’s the media in this country which is, of course, beyond hopeless. Watching Rachel Maddow the other month throwing a few medium-speed hardballs at Rand Paul only served to remind me just how rare it is for any of these pathetic hacks to actually do their job, as opposed to doing the cash-driven bidding of those in power, especially tough-guy Republicans who must get plenty of laughs out of how easy it is to bully the Washington press whores – er, sorry, I mean press corps. There’s nothing quite so self-made as the disasters of Election 2000 and the Iraq invasion of 2003, and the absence of any sort of serious media scepticism in those cases simply illustrates how utterly worthless the press truly are. Except, of course, as excellent public relations specialists for plutocrats. These days it seems like the only outlet doing anything approaching serious journalism is Rolling Stone. As to what it says about American society and journalism that you have to wade through cover photos of Lady Gaga’s full-on unclad posterior to find out the lies our government is telling us, well, I’ll leave that to you.

But clearly the neutering of the obedient profit-motivated media has worked spectacularly. One of the key fronts in this class warfare conducted by the wealthy in America has been with respect to framing. For three decades now, all we’ve heard is how government is a screw-up and how heroically efficient are the captains of industry in the private sector. The way regressives trash our own government in a democracy would certainly have seemed traitorous in another day. Just imagine if you said the same things about the military, which seems to miraculously escape the right’s attention as the biggest and most famously wasteful government bureaucracy of all. Moreover, looking back over Korea, Vietnam, Iraq and Afghanistan, not just a small bit of the curtain has been pulled back from the notion of the military’s supposed infallibility. It’s been two-thirds of a century since the United States won a big war against a serious adversary, and even then the Russians did the heavy lifting, at least in Europe. Somehow we never hear much about big, incompetent government in that context, though.

But, hey, forgive my little flight into logical analysis there. We really cannot have that in these times. For a minute there, I forgot to forget. It won’t happen again, Mr. O’Brien, I assure you. From now on, up is down, black is white, war is peace, government is bad and corporations are purveyors of Happy Meals (happy, that is, unless you happen to be a cow, like having small businesses around, have a problem with obesity, don’t want your planet to catch fire, or object to the creation of massive great lakes full of animal waste). Yep, big business is good! That’s why we need to apologize to BP for our government “shaking them down” and forcing them to be slightly-barely-kinda-nominally-sorta responsible for their ecological and economic epic disaster in the Gulf. Get it?

But the other sad truth is that, at the bottom of this roll call of nefarious predators – under every Cheney and Obama and Brian Williams and Lloyd Blankfein doing (his green) god’s work, is a great big stinking pile of yahoos better known as “Us”. We’ll vote Republican this fall because we utterly lack the intellectual curiosity to investigate other options. We’ll vote Republican because we’re greedy and lazy and willing to step on anyone’s throat to get our little slice of prosperity back. We’ll vote Republican as if we weren’t only two years ago just absolutely counting down every second until the previous government packed up and left town. You know, the er, uh, Republicans.

But I have just one question for my fellow Americans before they step into that voting booth. The truth is that what ails us now is exactly what y’all have been voting for over the last three decades. The truth is that if you vote Republican in November it will all only get worse. The truth is that you’re living the regressive dream just now, right as we speak.

We’ve let corporations run wild. We’ve decimated the government whose function it was to regulate them in the public’s interest. We’ve shifted a very large pile of your money into the hands of the richest one percent of us, and given you and your kids loads of government debt to pay off in exchange. We’ve shipped your job off to China or India. We’ve completely immunized all branches of your government from any form of influence other than from rapacious plutocrats.

So my question is, fellow Americans, now that we’ve all had a nice heaping helping of what regressive politics means for us real people down here below the stratosphere, “How’s that recessioney, oily thing working out for ya?”

Thomas Jefferson: "If the American people ever allow private banks to control the issue of their currency, first by inflation, then by deflation, the banks…will deprive the people of all property until their children wake-up homeless on the continent their fathers conquered…. The issuing power should be taken from the banks and restored to the people, to whom it properly belongs. "

“General Petraeus is a military man constantly at war with the facts,” began the MoveOn.org attack ad against Gen. David Petraeus back in 2007, after he had delivered a report to Congress on the status of the war in Iraq. George W. Bush was president, and MoveOn was accusing Petraeus of “cooking the books for the White House.” The campaign asked “General Petraeus or General Betray Us?” on a full-page ad in The Washington Post. MoveOn took tremendous heat for the campaign, but stood its ground.

Three years later, Barack Obama is president, Petraeus has become his man in Afghanistan, and MoveOn pulls the critical Web content. Why? Because Bush’s first war, Afghanistan, has become Obama’s war, a quagmire. The U.S. will eventually negotiate its withdrawal from Afghanistan. The only difference between now and then will be the number of dead, on all sides, and the amount of (borrowed) money that will be spent.

Petraeus’ confirmation to become the military commander in Afghanistan was never in question. He replaces Gen. Stanley McChrystal, who resigned shortly after his macho criticisms of his civilian leadership became public in a recent Rolling Stone magazine article.

The statistics for Afghanistan, Obama’s Vietnam, are surging. June, with at least 100 U.S. deaths, is the highest number reported since the invasion in 2001. 2010 is on pace to be the year with the highest U.S. fatalities. Similar fates have befallen soldiers from the other, so-called coalition countries. Petraeus is becoming commander not only of the U.S. military in Afghanistan, but of all forces, as the invasion and occupation of Afghanistan is run by NATO.

U.S. troops, expected to rise to 98,000 this year, far outnumber those from other nations. Public and political support in many of those countries is waning.

Journalist Michael Hastings, who wrote the Rolling Stone piece, was in Paris with McChrystal to profile him. What didn’t get as much attention was Hastings’ description of why McChrystal was there:

“He’s in France to sell his new war strategy to our NATO allies—to keep up the fiction, in essence, that we actually have allies. Since McChrystal took over a year ago, the Afghan war has become the exclusive property of the United States. Opposition to the war has already toppled the Dutch government, forced the resignation of Germany’s president and sparked both Canada and the Netherlands to announce the withdrawal of their 4,500 troops. McChrystal is in Paris to keep the French, who have lost more than 40 soldiers in Afghanistan, from going all wobbly on him.”

The whistle-blower website WikiLeaks.org, which received international attention after releasing leaked video from a U.S. attack helicopter showing the indiscriminate slaughter of civilians and a Reuters cameraman and his driver in Baghdad, has just posted a confidential CIA memo detailing possible public relations strategies to counter waning public support for the Afghan War. The agency memo reads: “If domestic politics forces the Dutch to depart, politicians elsewhere might cite a precedent for ‘listening to the voters.’ French and German leaders have over the past two years taken steps to preempt an upsurge of opposition but their vulnerability may be higher now.”

I just returned from Toronto, covering the G-20 summit and the protests. The gathered leaders pledged, among other things, to reduce government deficits by 50 percent by 2013. In the U.S., that means cutting $800 billion, or about 20 percent of the budget. Two Nobel Prize-winning economists have weighed in with grave predictions. Joseph Stiglitz said, “There are many cases where these kinds of austerity measures have led to ... recessions into depressions.” And Paul Krugman wrote: “Who will pay the price for this triumph of orthodoxy? The answer is, tens of millions of unemployed workers, many of whom will go jobless for years, and some of whom will never work again.”

In order to make the cuts promised, Obama would have to raise taxes and cut social programs such as Social Security and Medicare. Or he could cut the war budget. I say “war budget” because it is not to be confused with a defense budget. Cities and states across the country are facing devastating budget crises. Pensions are being wiped out. Foreclosures are continuing at record levels. A true defense budget would shore up our schools, our roads, our towns, our social safety net. The U.S. House of Representatives is under pressure to pass a $33 billion Afghan War supplemental this week.

June 26, 2010

Read, learn, think....save yourselves!

Mission Accomplished: The Reagan Occupation and the Destruction of the American Middle Class

By David Michael Green

Eightyyears ago, something occurred in America that was never supposed to happen. An aristocrat came to the presidency and engineered a policy revolution that created a broad and prosperous middle class where it had not existed as such before.

To do this, Franklin Roosevelt and his party had to rewrite the existing rules of wealth redistribution in the United States such that the traditionally fantastically wealthy overclass (which had grown even fatter as the industrialism of the prior century concentrated wealth yet further) would become merely tremendously wealthy from that point forward, in order to leave enough for others to live a decent life.

Needless to say, this rankled the country club set, but, remarkably, they more or less made peace with this development during the early decades of the post-war era, and largely cooperated with the new economic order. So did their political representatives. The Eisenhower administration was the first chance after twenty years of the New Deal to dismantle the newly created American welfare state, and Ike not only refused to take that opportunity, but famously labeled those in his party who wanted to as "stupid".

If Eisenhower, in his gray suit, black-and-white photos and de rigueur businessman's hat from the era seems quaint today, so does his political restraint. By the 1980s that was ancient history, and remains so to this day, including through (and via) two Democratic presidencies now.

If Americans understood the real ambitions of Ronald Reagan and his puppeteers, and if they knew the degree to which the supposed patriotism of those folks extended beyond falsity and into the far darker waters of being an irritating irrelevance put on purely for show, then they would not only stop seeing Reagan as some sort of national hero, but would also understand that he instead launched a process far more equivalent to an invasion and occupation of this country.

The goal of the right which cares about America about as much as it does about Burkina Faso has been to restore the economic order last seen under Herbert Hoover, in which a tiny minority possess vast sums of wealth and there is (therefore) essentially no remaining middle class. It is nothing short of a breathtaking display of a world class greed, worthy of the ages.

It has also been a work of strategic genius (in much the same way one might appreciate the Germans' engineering prowess in figuring out the logistics of how to mass murder ten or twelve million civilians in a year or two), one which has drawn upon deep psychological insights, absolutely sociopathic amoralism, and clever tactics that have all simultaneously pushed in the same direction. In plain English, they hired some politicians of hit-man level moral integrity, who then marshaled fear, insecurity, hate and deceit into a witch's brew of self-destruction that would prove highly attractive to a large segment of the population already sinking from the effects of a global economic order rebalancing after decades of post-war American dominance.

Of course, you couldn't just come right out and say, "Vote for me and I'll give your money to people so rich they can't even imagine what they'll do with it (but they still demand to have it anyhow)", so slightly more subtle tactics had to be employed. It is telling that the most honest thing Barack Obama ever said was when he thought there were no microphones in the room. But he was right when, at a presidential fundraiser in San Francisco he told the wine and cheese set that the right uses guns, god and gays (I would add Gaddafis) to scare people out of their money. I'll believe that Republicans are serious about protecting heterosexual marriage on the day that you can't find half of them prowling the gay bars of DC every night (and you don't even want to know what the other half are into).

This bait-and-switch tactic worked perfectly well whenever it was applied. It didn't hurt that the regressive Billy-Bobs who vote for these folks are as dumb as a tree. With bags of hammers for leaves. But stupid is really only the facilitating quality, and often one that is neither present nor required. What really drives this stuff is fear. If you can turn that into a loathing of fur'ners, fags, bitches, blackies and brownies, you got their vote. Then you can do what you really set out to accomplish in the first place. George W. Bush's 2004 campaign was the paradigmatic example. All year he talked about jamming through a constitutional amendment to ban gay marriage. Big priority. Urgent national issue. The religitarded across America just about peed themselves, they were so excited. Then he gets elected and is brazen enough to announce that there'll be no such effort, after all, and that his signature legislative initiative will be an attempt to hand over the fat Social Security pot of money to Goldman Sachs. The redneck dolts with their Bush/Cheney "04 bumper-stickers didn't know what to think. So, of course, they just didn't.

Meanwhile, to say that this kleptocratic revolution worked really well is only untrue by means of the verb tense employed. It is still working really well. And the final leg of Reagan's March to the Sea is now upon us. Chunks of middle class body parts have been hacked off, bit by bit, over the decades, "til there's little remaining anymore. Remember how they told us that "free trade' wouldn't decimate our jobs, our unions and our bargaining power? Is that why little old ladies serve Happy Meals at McDonald's all across the country, assuming they're lucky enough to get that job? Remember how they said that massive tax cuts for the wealthy would be "revenue neutral' and would jump-start the economy? Which is confusing since the national debt doubled under George W. Bush, and then he proceeded to hand us the worst economy since the Great Depression. Remember how they told us that we needed to slash wasteful government spending on benefits? Now that we've become the ones who need those, they're gone. Remember when they said that government is our enemy and corporations should be free to do whatever they want? You know, like spill oil or trade derivatives?

There's another little trick that is about to become especially prominent in the coming years. When Reagan came to office and began his "voodoo economics" project of nearly quadrupling the national debt, after having promised to cut it instead, many people were puzzled by this. Personally, I figured that they just did the math and realized that in the real world (where governments sometimes live but campaigns rarely do) something simply had to give. If you slash tax revenues and massively increase military spending, guess what's gonna happen to your budget? Others, however, saw a more nefarious game being played, and perhaps they were right. This is the idea that they intentionally ran up deficits so large that the national government would be forced to do what it otherwise would not, which is to slash spending on popular entitlements and other social programs.

Whether or not the conspiracy was real, it is the case that the federal government is running humongous deficits every year, which pile up further on the massive national debt. And it is also the case that we are now hearing a rising chorus on the right especially from the tea party know-nothings about slashing government spending as the top priority for Washington. Even though, according to the principles of Keynesian economics, this is the last thing we should be doing during a recession.

And, of course, something tells me that as the pinch is increasingly felt, the call for cuts won't be in the domain of military spending, even though our allocation there is obscenely out of proportion to any imaginable threat in the world, and is roughly equal to what almost the entire rest of the world spends on defense that's one country equal to almost two hundred others, combined. I'm also guessing that we won't be raising taxes on the wealthiest Americans either, even though they pay far less than they did in the pre-Reagan era, when the country was generally very prosperous, and even though they often pay a lower percentage in taxes than the secretaries and janitors who work for them. No, we can't touch those folks.

Instead, the intense pressure now will be to finish the job of eviscerating the middle class and transferring every last nickel of their wealth to the oligarchs who fancy themselves masters of the universe. Unemployment insurance, for example. Never mind that we have ten percent official unemployment and closer to twenty percent in reality, or that whole cities like Detroit are being wiped out. The Republican minority in the Senate, along with the Democratic "moderates" there, are now refusing to extend expiring unemployment benefits (which are already a pittance when they exist). Nine hundred thousand laid-off workers have thus lost their meager sub-subsistence benefits, and that number will grow to more than a million-and-a-half in a few days now. Guess why. Because regressive senators including John Kerry and Maria Cantwell are holding unemployment insurance extensions hostage to protecting a loophole that allows wealthy fund managers to be taxed on their profits at an obscenely low percentage rate. How's that for national priorities? How's that for compassionate conservatism?

Next, inevitably, will come entitlements. Indeed, most of the states in the union are already heading that way, cutting pensions for employees. Not to mention certain low priority areas like education, which is getting slashed from California to New York. How long can it be before Medicare and Social Security are put on the chopping block? And why? Because we have our priorities good and straight, pal: a morbidly bloated military and pathetically low tax rates for the wealthiest among us comes first. Then, if we could somehow do it for free I suppose we could allow decent education, or health care, or retirement with dignity for our elders. But, of course, since that can't be done without cost, those things must go.

The other stratigic initiative now reaching fruition during the right's three decade-long campaign to massively redistribute wealth in this country literally, the crime of the century is the evisceration of the state. This must be done (or, more accurately, it must be done in some respects but absolutely not in others) because the state is the only force capable of standing up to the power of concentrated wealth, and because the state sets the very rules by which such wealth either is or isn't concentrated. It also must be done because the state nominally speaks for the public and the public interest, as against the private interest.

Since Reagan, regressive puppet politicians have been spouting anti-state rhetoric and sarcastic venom with increasing intensity. Saint Ron of Hypocrisy told us that government was the problem, not the solution, seemingly without noticing the irony of his massive military build-up or the government-enforced restrictions the right favors on everything from abortion to gay marriage to euthanasia. Now, as gutted and corrupted regulatory institutions have permitted massively harmful meltdowns ranging from Wall Street to coal mines to oil wells, we are forced to listen to sermons from those on the right about the incompetence of government. Well, yeah. If in fact you staff government regulatory bodies with industry shills who are explicitly ordered not to actually, er, regulate, and if you legislate away their power to effectively do so anyhow, and if you pulverize conscientious whistleblowers to within an inch of their lives, then guess what? That little bit of government will in fact be incompetent. In fact, it will be nearly as bad at the competence thing as, say, all the big banks on Wall Street (which had to be rescued by the, uh, government), or all the big auto companies in Detroit (ditto), or British Petroleum, or Enron, or the savings-and-loan industry, or...

And so, despite the astonishing illogic of it all, the American people now clamor for more harm to be brought upon themselves and more of their money to be looted for the further enrichment of the wealthiest one-tenth of one percent of the population. It certainly doesn't help that the supposed "party of the people" is every bit as much a part of the problem as anyone else, and arguably far more so given the extra measure of disingenuousness involved. From NAFTA to WTO to welfare "reform' to the Telecommunications Bill, Wall Street never had better friend in the White House than Bill Clinton. That is, until Barack Obama simply outright changed the address of Goldman Sachs' headquarters to 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue. As we speak, the president and his party in Congress are busy gutting meaningful "reform' of the shamelessly gluttonous finance industry, just as their masters have ordered them to do. And if you think Obama's bad now, wait until after November. Like Clinton in 1994, he will take the trouncing he's about to receive in the election as a signal to move even further to the right.

And thus the Reagan Occupation inches closer yet to a full-blown "mission accomplished". The middle class is on its knees and shrinking fast. Unions have been broken into irrelevance. Government, supposedly an agent of the public interest, has become a complete tool of those it is meant to monitor. Both political parties are fully owned by the oligarchy. The public has been brainwashed into seeing its allies as enemies and its enemies as allies. We have been drained of hope that any actor on the horizon can come to our rescue.

Bad policy choices by self-serving politicians? Would that "twere only thus.

June 25, 2010

The good folks at http://askcherlock.com/, Cher and Rich, have given I and three other blogs an award. Thank you Cher and Rich. We that blog try to make a difference with our efforts and do hope that we are presenting points of view that stir some thought or just appreciation. In my case, I try to pull important information from the pages of the blogosphere that I think people with no time to do the searching and reading will find conveniently in one place, with my intrepretive commentary of course. The other three blogs are as follows: Carpetbaggery, Vulcan’s Hammer, and At My Soiree

I would like to take this time to thank another blogger who contributed very much to the awakening of this political blogger, my heart felt thanks to Euro Yank with his elaborate EuroYank New World Order Reportsat http://euroyank.blogspot.com/ and his faster loading,EuroYank The Blog at http://euroyanktheblog.blogspot.com/ . At these two sites Euro has in the neighborhood of a thousand posts. At first I took Euro as too strong in his judgements, predictions and intrepretations of this American political system but as I dug deeper, and often with his proding, into what he was saying I realized he was mostly spot on, and when I say mostly it is only that I have not gone as far as Euro in my suspicious contempt for this American political system, Euro may be 100% correct. I have seen a review on Euro that called him braver than most in dare saying what he was saying. Euro has had to fight multiple battles with censorship and had to resort to the legal system to get his blogs reinstated. I have had the pleasure of getting to know this man this winter on Facebook through many a three in the morning chat, he has pulled a little disappearance act and Euro I do hope all is well and I do wish you the best. Keep a goin Euro!

Euro is responsible for turning me on to broadcast political commentator Thom Hartmann and I thank him for that. Thom Hartmann is not extreme in his views as is Alex Jones for example, he is not into radio politics for the money, he is a self made millionaire from a working class background who posesses incredible experience, wit, wisdom and intellect. Thom will debate, and does daily, any right wing political figure or call in radio listener, and knock their socks off, frankly I don't know why they bother, in a very polite civil manner he just turns them into mince meat. Please give Thom Hartmann a listen, he is a sheer pleasure to listen to.

Once again, Cher and Rich, thank you, it is an honor to be an acquaintance and fellow blogger with you.

June 23, 2010

Central Banking in Crisis: Some Twenty Countries on the Verge of Insolvency

Market Volatility as the Debt Implosion Continues

by Bob Chapman

Cycles were created for the accumulation of wealth. A boom occurs and you get wealthy from investments on the way up and even wealthier on the way down, because the elitists are controlling the supply of money and credit and interest rates. That is the real underlying mission of the Fed, which is owned by banking and Wall Street. All the power to control markets and create inflation and deflation lies with the Federal Reserve. Politicians do not create monetary policy, the Fed does. The politicians do as they are told. They know from time to time there will be economic pain, but the payoffs are so good they learn to live with it.

This time the damage is so bad that the Fed has been forced to monetize trillions of dollars of debt. The disease this time has spread to Europe with the ECB, using, quantitative easing by simply creating money out of thin air. That is something they said they would never do. The only real liquidity in Europe is emanating from the ECB and the Fed. We believe that eventually countries will fail, as Iceland has. You know all the possible victims. There are presently 20 of them including the US and UK . Three-card Monte games do not last forever. If liquidity is that scarce then where is the money coming from? The only place it could be coming from is the Fed. Not only is a $2 trillion bailout in process, but also as banks and thrift institutions fail stress tests some will be bailed out by being absorbed by other supposedly solvent institutions. When that option is gone then governments must bail them out. When the monetization hits the entire system collapses. After 50 or more years in this business we believe the system is definitely going to fold.

All the central banks involved are broke or virtually broke. If they are not broke why is their condition a big secret? The Bundesbank told Spain last week that we do not want stress test results made public. The reason obviously was because of the sad condition German banks are in and their penchant again to keep everything secret. These are the same people who want a one-world currency in the form of an SDR, which is worthless, because it has no backing. It is just another fiat currency. They all are in such bad shape they cannot even sterilize their interventions. The new trillions we see in the system in Europe and the US cannot be sterilized.

In England we see the Bank of England financing and monetizing the UK budget deficit. The alternative is financial collapse. The UK is in such terrible shape that they refused to partake in the almost $1 trillion bailout of the euro zone PIIGS. Recently the Fed bought $1.25 trillion in toxic waste and $800 billion in Treasury paper for over $2 trillion dollars. Adding to the incompetence and desperation, the ECB is buying the toxic debt of euro zone that are on the verge of bankruptcy. All entities are extending their debt buying programs with money they do not have and for people that can never pay the debt back. The central banks do not care as they save the financial institutions. The citizens are an afterthought. Not one of them wants to give up their power base. They don’t want to declare insolvency – they want the public to pay their debts. Weimar wasn’t much different, except it wasn’t caused by German greed, but by the vengeance of its enemies to bring about a war worse than the war to end all wars. This time it is propelled by greed and a quest for world government.

The result of all this is that some 20 major countries are on the edge of insolvency, not to mention scores of other countries. We see one funding crisis after another. Even major countries can’t sell their bonds even with higher than normal yields. Interest rates are close to zero. We suppose they could go into minus territory, where they would pay you to borrow money. Don’t laugh, it has happened more than once. It was also not uncommon to see negative lease rates, as countries engaged in the suppression of gold prices. Governments do anything they want. This same state of mind exists in increases in money and credit. Presently almost all governments are in trouble. If they haven’t made a dog’s breakfast out of their own economies they have bought bonds from those who have and stand to take stiff losses. Look at the euro zone’s almost $1 trillion bailout of the PIIGS. Do you really think those bonds will ever be paid off – we don’t. It is this concept of interconnectivity that as the players are finding out it is a disaster. How can solvent European countries even contemplate a $2 trillion bailout for nations that really do not care if the debt is ever paid off? That is how today’s world turns.

We fall back on a very important underlying concept and that is if you do not understand what is really going on behind the scenes you can never get the right answers and conclusions. People talk about cycles and super cycles as if they occurred out of nowhere. They all happen by design. As an example, the economy has improved, but that is because of $800 billion in stimulus and Fed spending. The growth that evolved was tepid at best. Now that the economy is trailing off, the stimulus having expended itself, and the question is what comes next? The only way to stave off recession/depression is to have another stimulus plan. That, of course, doesn’t affect the root causes - it just gains time.

In this debt parade we find it interesting that but for one source, we see no mention in the media of America ’s contribution, via the IMF, of some $60 billion. The frauds and criminality continue unabated. Nowhere do they tell you that among the biggest speculators were the banks that you are being forced to bailout.

Over this past year we have seen a stampede into corporate and Treasury bonds, at miniscule yields, due to the perception that bonds are safer. These investors are in for a big surprise as banks and other professionals start to factor in the risks involved, which throw off such poor returns. As the world economy runs out of stimulus and liquidity that has been chocked off by central banks, the realization will be that the prospects of countries and corporations have been severely diminished. GDP is falling and could in many countries, led by the US , should be negative for the last two quarters of the year and beyond. There is no safety in bonds, particularly municipals. Bonds are in a bubble, as many will soon discover. If income falls the ability to service bonds gets more difficult, both by government and corporations. While these myriad problems exist our Congress grovels before the political masters of Wall Street, banking, insurance, big Parma and transnational conglomerates. Pricing of risk is now impossible, which means risk rises exponentially. Eventually this reality will make credit harder to access as we move into the future.

What is important more than anything else are jobs and those who create them cannot easily borrow money. At the same time free trade, globalization, offshoring and outsourcing kill our jobs and fill the coffers of transnational conglomerates that keep their profits tax-free offshore. You cannot do that. While this transpires yourCongress stuffs their pockets with cash from elitists who own them.

The troubles we see in Europe are but a reflection of what is going on worldwide. This leads us to the conclusion that Americans and others are being systematically betrayed by their legislators. – A problem that can be remedied in November by removing almost all of them.

The European rescue attempt will not work nor will phony, temporary stimulus, or increased issuance of money and credit. Do not forget as well that a great deal of that European debt is being held by US institutions. Expending volatility is on the way, as the debt implosion continues. Is it any wonder, as we predicted, gold and the shares are hitting new highs.

Stock and bond markets have no way to go but down. If you are not out of both, with the exception of gold and silver shares, you had better be. The big money, the professionals, are in a state of panic and that money has to go somewhere. Yes, you guessed it, and that is very bullish for gold and silver related assets. As an added incentive the dollar is in the process of completing a head and shoulders, which means the rally is over and the dollar is headed down. Even though the dollar decoupled from gold over a year ago, as we predicted, and probably only affects gold by some 20%, it is still gold bullish and not neutral or negative. Adding further fuel to the fire we predicted four years ago not only real estate would collapse and that foreclosures would wipe out trillions in real estate values, but that millions would walk away from their underwater homes. Homes where mortgages were greater than the home value. The first wave began two years ago, but we now see affected those with good to excellent credit who are defaulting because one or even two breadwinners have lost their jobs. Now we have those underwater that won’t sit with a wasting asset. Besides they realize this could now go on for years, perhaps two more years to the bottom of the market and many more before any semblance of normality is seen. They have now become about 13% of all defaults, up from 4% three years ago. Mortgage holders also see this as payback for the banks that caused the debacle and screwed the homeowner in the first place. Banks aided and abetted all kinds of fraud and no one has ever been charged, never mind sent to jail. The Fed and government also bailed out the banks and not the public and that has further incensed homeowners and others. It pays to be a crook. The banks are losing about $100 billion a year and that is funneled into the economy via other channels – another stimulus plan, that is because many no longer pay a mortgage or rent. In the next two years homes in negative equinity will rise from 25% to 50% to 60%. Lots of lenders are going under and that is the way it should be. It, of course, will be devastating for the economy.

June 22, 2010

Interest rates are bottomed out and the Dollar is indefensible, depression defenses are exhausted already. If interest rates are raised to defend the Dollar, the stock market will crash(worldwide). Unemployment, home foreclosures and bankruptcies are epidemic while state governments sink into insolvency. Pension plans and 401K's are shedding value. Do you see the writing on the wall?

In the Republican Great Depression of the nineteen thirties, which lasted ten years, by 1932 the DOW lost 77% of it‘s value, the S&P Index lost 80%. Stock market crashes precede depression by 2 or 3 years. It took 4 years for maximum unemployment to be reached in 1933. The typical duration of a depression is 7 to 10 years. The most likely culprit to trigger the final crash is the fall of the Dollar. In the 20's and 30's we had low national debt with high manufacturing activity, today we have a very high national debt with huge budget and trade deficits and our manufacturing has been off shored. From what I read Reaganonomics will lead us into the worst depression in history. Well, we shall see, won't we.

According to economist Dr. Ravi Batra:

“ The coming cataclysm would be historically the worst in intensity, but it would last only six or seven years, because the American public, much more conscious of it’s rights today than before, won’t stand for another decade of devastation. However market imbalances caused by extreme wealth disparity take a long time to unravel. No depression in history has been shorter than seven years, and I think the next one would also be that long.

The economy does not prosper in proportion to a market bubble, but it does suffer tragically in the aftermath of the burst. In the rising stage, the richest wallow in waste and luxury, but in the declining stage the bitter fruit of their greed and folly poisons everyone. This is exactly what happened in 1929. One after another, the basic pillars of the economy fell like dominoes. By 1933 the unemployment rate reached a high of 25% of the labor force, with millions employed only part-time.

The stock market crash in America will be either preceded or immediately followed by similar crashes all over the world .Foreign lending to the United States will then cease altogether. The Fed will be caught in a cruel dilemma. It will be sailing in uncharted waters, with no guiding precedents. Accommodating the gargantuan appetite of the government deficit and of failing banks, with foreign investment chocked off, would require the Fed to print great quantities of new money, enough to threaten the return of crippling inflation along with the sky-high interest rates, which in the end would bring about a depression anyway. On the other hand, keeping the money supply under reasonable control, with limitless government borrowing and banking needs, would also sharply raise the interest rates and cause thousands of bank failures. The fed will have to choose between two evils - an inflationary or a deflationary depression.

If America were a surplus nation, it would continue to lend money abroad, keeping other countries afloat. It did that for three decades following WWII. But now the worlds largest economy is also the worlds largest debtor. It is simply impossible for other countries to keep America prosperous for long. The American appetite is gargantuan. A debtor can thrive on the fortunes of a lender, but a lender cannot forever prosper when a borrower has an insatiable appetite. Something will have to give and that will be international commerce. When the dollar begins to fall freely, foreign lending and international commerce will sharply decline. The drop will be faster this time than in the 1930’s because of increased global interdependence. "

Our depression fighting weapons have been used up, Commercial banks received the boost and overnight Investment banks were allowed to change their charters to become eligible for bailout money. The American people received no relief other than extended unemployment benefits and Cobra medical coverage for those qualifying, the former is in a congressional fight for it’s life right now and Cobra is planned to expire. If relief had been given, even as a low interest loan to struggling home owners the money would have trickled up to the banks and a multiplier effect would have added a boost to the economy as well as to the struggling banks. But no, open the Fed up to .25% loans to the banks and let them do as they please.

The free money policy of .25 percent interest has addicted the financial titans to free money. They are speculating in commodities, the stock market(it is your money they are gambling with in the market, for now this is what props it up), they continue to buy up competitors( with your money once again), and they drain the profits out through mega salaries, mega bonuses and dividends.

The interest on the .25 loans from the Fed is subsidized by you, the American taxpayer, to the tune of $400,000 added to the deficit for each ten million. That is insanity. We are paying the financial titans to screw up the economy. The Federal Reserve is giving away money below cost to stimulate the economy with no direction what so ever on how to spend it. How do I get in on that racket?

I have phrased it this way before and it is imperative that you understand….….. The Republicans created the deficit, expect the poor and middle class to pay it off while they buy the debt up and sit around the pool collecting the interest. Not only do they sit around the pool waiting for dividend and interest checks but they only pay 15% tax(capital gains). They have a racket going for themselves……….As the average working man kills himself working for shrinking wages and losing 1/4 to 1/3 to taxes the wealthy’s Cosmopolitans and Mai Tais are tasting great in the sun!

We have an economy going into convulsions and on a respirator while the Financial institutions have a free prescription for steroids. Will there be anyone providing for the survival of the people? Are we headed into depression? Well we shall see, won’t we.

June 20, 2010

We are sinking, this is hard reality, the holes in the ship have to be plugged. For many the water is up to their necks. Are you going to wait until the water is over your mouth before you panic? Are we going to let everything collapse before we act? The pragmatic solution is the Willie Sutton line of reasoning(Why do you rob banks?....."Because that's where the money is.") The money has been floated up to the top and that is where the money is. Increasing axes on incomes over three million seems like an awful fair way to start. Americans fear high taxation from a runaway government, what is the difference if it is high taxes or high prices from runaway monopolistic corporations? Your ass needs protecting and it is corporations coming after your ass, government is your only avenue of protection. Government does do some things well, corporations do one thing well, maximize profits. Corporate America has no interest in your rights and liberties though they will justify foreign wars with this meme.

In the end we rise or sink together, our choice. Will we sit on the couch in paralizing fear or organize and be a part of the push back?

It is Time to Raise Taxes on the Wealthy and Save the American Dream

By Mick Youther

******

How did we get into such a predicament?

As the mainstream media fixates on the black gold washing up on the beaches of the Gulf Coast, the rest of the United States is quietly drowning in Red Ink.

Illinois is facing a $13 billion deficit for the upcoming fiscal year (roughly half of the state's operating budget), and it is just one of many states facing financial problems:

"[Thirty-two] states have run out funds to make unemployment benefit payments and that the federal government has been supplying these states with funds so that they can make theirpayments to the unemployed. In some cases, states have borrowed billions."-- EconomicPolicyJournal.com, 5/21/10

"Over the last two years, at least 45 states have slashed health, education and low-income assistance programs; 30 raised regressive sales taxes and fees; and 42 cut their payrolls through layoffs, unpaid leaves (furloughs) and hiring freezes. Since August 2008, state and local governments eliminated 192,000 jobs."-- WSWS.org, 5/21/10

Bob Herbert of the NY Times sums it up:

"A story that is not getting nearly enough attention is the ruinous fiscal meltdown occurring in state after state, all across the country. Taxes are being raised. Draconian cuts in services are being made. Public employees are being fired. The tissue-thin national economic recovery is being undermined. And in many cases, the most vulnerable populations--the sick, the elderly, the young and the poor--are getting badly hurt."--3/20/10

No"it is not because the terrorists attacked us; or because Obama is a Kenya-born card-carrying communist bent on destroying America; or any of the other conspiracy theories that Glenn Beck scrawls across his blackboard daily."but it is a conspiracy, and it has been going on for thirty years.

"Back in the 70s a Republican strategist [and Reagan advisor] named Jude Wanniski came up with what he called the two Santa Claus theory: when Republican are in power they should cut taxes, spend like drunken sailors and put it all on the national credit card--without ever mentioning a word about the deficit they were creating. This allows Republicans to be the tax cutting Santa Claus and the spending/stimulus Santa Claus."--Thom Hartmann, progressive radio host and author, 6/1/10

In 1980, the Republicans' first official Santa Claus, Ronald Reagan, cut income taxes on wealthy Americans from 70% down to 27%, and reduced Corporate taxes until they accounted for less than 9% of federal tax revenues, instead of the 33% they represented in 1951.

It was called supply-side economics (a.k.a Reaganomics, Voodoo economics, or the "trickle-down theory"), and it claimed that if we cut taxes on wealthy Americans, they would invest that money in such wonderful ways that it would stimulate the economy, and benefits would "trickle down" to all Americans.

Of course, like most Republican theories, it didn't work--unless its real purpose was to bankrupt the government and destroy the American middle-class. In that case, it is working pretty well.

In 1982, the first full year for Reagan's policies, the economy shrank by 2%, the worst performance since the Great Depression. -- Robert Freeman, CommonDreams.org, 5/14/06

"Although it had taken the United States more than 200 years to accumulate the first $1 trillion of national debt, it took only five years under Reagan to add the second one trillion dollars to the debt. By the end of the 12 years of the Reagan-Bush administrations, the national debt had quadrupled to $4 trillion!"-- Allen W. Smith, Professor of Economics, Emeritus, Eastern IllinoisUniversity, Dissident Voice, 4/14/10

After a brief period of fiscal sanity during the Clinton Administration, George W. Bush was appointed President and took up right where Reagan and Poppa Bush had left off--cutting taxes for the rich, raising "defense" spending and starting wars; and paying for it all on the taxpayer's credit card. Bush's final year budget showed a record deficit of $1.4 trillion, and he had increased the National Debt to $9.849 trillion--the largest increase by any President in U.S. history.

"Although it had taken the United States more than 200 years to accumulate the first $1 trillion of national debt, it took only five years under Reagan to add the second one trillion dollars to the debt. By the end of the 12 years of the Reagan-Bush administrations, the national debt had quadrupled to $4 trillion!"-- Allen W. Smith, Professor of Economics, Emeritus, Eastern IllinoisUniversity, Dissident Voice, 4/14/10

America is now mired in the Great Recession, and we need to do the same thing that Roosevelt did to save us from the Great Depression--raise taxes on the wealthy. They can afford it:

"In the last 30 years"the top five percent of American families saw their real incomes increase 81 percent while the lowest-income fifth saw their real incomes decline by one percent..".--Progress Illinois, 3/27/09

All of the income gains in 2005 went to the top 10 percent of households, while the bottom 90 percent of households saw income declines. (Economic Policy Institute, 3/28/07)

"In the last 30 years"the top five percent of American families saw their real incomes increase 81 percent while the lowest-income fifth saw their real incomes decline by one percent..".--Progress Illinois, 3/27/09 All of the income gains in 2005 went to the top 10 percent of households, while the bottom 90 percent of households saw income declines. (Economic Policy Institute, 3/28/07) In 2006, taxpayers in the bottom 20 percent received an average refund of $23 from the Bush tax cuts; the middle 20 percent received $448; the top 1 percent received $39,020; and taxpayers in the top 0.1 percent received $200,523. (Urban-Brookings Tax Policy Center, 2/7/06)

To hear the Republicans tell it; raising taxes on the wealthiest Americans would have an effect similar to a direct strike on earth by a planet-killer asteroid.

"but history tells a much different story:

"After the Republican Great Depression, FDR put this nation back to work, in part by raising taxes on income above $3 to $4 million a year (in today's dollars) to 91 percent, and corporate taxes to over 50% of profits. The revenue from those income taxes built dams, roads, bridges, sewers, water systems, schools, hospitals, train stations, railways, an interstate highway system, and airports. It educated a generation returning from World War II. It acted as a cap on the rare but occasional obsessively greedy person taking so much out of the economy that it impoverished the rest of us."--Thom Hartmann, http://www.commondreams.org/archive/2007/08/06/3003/

When the Clinton Administration reversed Reagonomics and raised taxes on the wealthy and lowered them on the middle class:

"The economy produced the longest sustained expansion in U.S. history. It created more than 22 million new jobs, the highest level of job creation ever recorded. Unemployment fell to its lowest level in over 30 years. Inflation fell to 2.5% per year compared to the 4.7% average over the prior 12 years. And overall economic growth averaged 4.0% per year compared to 2.8% average growth over the 12 years of the Reagan/Bush administrations. "By the time Clinton left office, the government was running surpluses of almost $140 billion per year."--Robert Freeman, CommonDreams.org, 5/14/06

******

Right now, Republicans in Congress are blocking an extension of unemployment benefits for 900 thousand Americans. They demand more and more cuts of services and programs to reduce the deficit (which they caused), but refuse to even consider raising taxes on wealthy Americans. This is wrong.

America is falling deeper and deeper in debt, and taxes must be raised--and will be raised (eventually). The only question is--will they be raised in time to save our schools and other government programs and services that so many people depend on.

Please call your state and federal representatives today, and let them know that it is time to raise taxes on wealthy Americans. Our tax system should promote the good of the many--not the greed of the few.

"The economy produced the longest sustained expansion in U.S. history. It created more than 22 million new jobs, the highest level of job creation ever recorded. Unemployment fell to its lowest level in over 30 years. Inflation fell to 2.5% per year compared to the 4.7% average over the prior 12 years. And overall economic growth averaged 4.0% per year compared to 2.8% average growth over the 12 years of the Reagan/Bush administrations. "By the time Clinton left office, the government was running surpluses of almost $140 billion per year."--Robert Freeman, CommonDreams.org, 5/14/06

Antoine de Saint-Exupery: " I know a planet where there is a certain red-faced gentleman. He has never looked at a star and all day he says over and over, just like you: "I am too busy with matters of consequence!" And that makes him swell up with pride. But he is not a man, he is a mushroom. "

June 19, 2010

We are about to embark on a momentous experiment to discover which of the two stories about the economy is true. If, in fact, fiscal consolidation proves to be the royal road to recovery and fast growth then we might as well bury Keynes once and for all. If however, the financial markets and their political fuglemen turn out to be as “super-asinine” as Keynes thought they were, then the challenge that financial power poses to good government has to be squarely faced.

In 1974, Edward Heath asked: “Who governs – government or trade unions?” Five years later British voters delivered a final verdict by electing Margaret Thatcher. The equivalent today would be: “Who governs – government or financial markets?” No clear answer has yet been given, but the question may well define the political battleground for the next five years. ...

The implicit premise of the coming retrenchment is that market economies are always at, or rapidly return to, full employment. It follows that a stimulus, whether fiscal or monetary, cannot improve on the existing situation. All that increased government spending does is to withdraw money from the private sector; all that printing money does is to cause inflation.

These propositions are a re-run of the famous “Treasury view” of 1929. By contrast, Keynes argued that demand can fall short of supply, and that when this happened, government vice turned into virtue. In a slump, governments should increase, not reduce, their deficits to make up for the deficit in private spending. Any attempt by government to increase its saving (in other words, to balance its budget) would only worsen the slump. This was his “paradox of thrift”. ...

Politicians clamouring for cuts in public spending ... talk about the need to restore “confidence in the markets”. The argument here is that deficits do positive harm by destroying business confidence. This collapse of confidence may come in several forms – fear of higher taxes, fear of default, fear of inflation. Deficits thus delay the natural (and rapid) recovery of the economy. If markets have come to the view that deficits are harmful, they must be appeased, even if they are wrong. ...

We are about to embark on a momentous experiment to discover which of the two stories about the economy is true. If, in fact, fiscal consolidation proves to be the royal road to recovery and fast growth then we might as well bury Keynes once and for all. If however, the financial markets and their political fuglemen turn out to be as “super-asinine” as Keynes thought they were, then the challenge that financial power poses to good government has to be squarely faced.

Paul Krugman, writing from Berlin, notes that economic logic and actual data do not support the arguments made by Austerians who are demanding that governments reduce debt levels. So what is their real motivation?:

That ’30s Feeling, by Paul Krugman, Commentary, NY Times: Suddenly, creating jobs is out, inflicting pain is in. Condemning deficits and refusing to help a still-struggling economy has become the new fashion everywhere, including the United States, where 52 senators voted against extending aid to the unemployed despite the highest rate of long-term joblessness since the 1930s.

Many economists, myself included, regard this turn to austerity as a huge mistake. It raises memories of 1937, when F.D.R.’s premature attempt to balance the budget helped plunge a recovering economy back into severe recession. ...

But despite these warnings, the deficit hawks are prevailing in most places — nowhere more than here, where the government has pledged 80 billion euros, almost $100 billion, in tax increases and spending cuts even though the economy continues to operate far below capacity.

What’s the economic logic behind the government’s moves? The answer, as far as I can tell, is that there isn’t any. ...

__

The key point is that while the advocates of austerity pose as hardheaded realists, doing what has to be done,... the numbers do not ... support their position. ... So the real motivations for their obsession with austerity lie somewhere else.

In America, many self-described deficit hawks are hypocrites, pure and simple: ...concerns about red ink vanish when it comes to tax breaks for the wealthy. Thus, Senator Ben Nelson, who sanctimoniously declared that we can’t afford $77 billion in aid to the unemployed, was instrumental in passing the first Bush tax cut, which cost a cool $1.3 trillion.

German deficit hawkery seems more sincere. But it still has nothing to do with fiscal realism. Instead, it’s about moralizing and posturing. Germans tend to think of running deficits as being morally wrong, while balancing budgets is considered virtuous, never mind the ... economic logic. “The last few hours were a singular show of strength,” declared Angela Merkel ... after a special cabinet meeting agreed on the austerity plan. And showing strength — or what is perceived as strength — is what it’s all about.

There will, of course, be a price for this posturing. Only part of that price will fall on Germany: German austerity will worsen the crisis in the euro area... Europe’s troubles are also leading to a weak euro, which perversely helps German manufacturing, but also exports the consequences of German austerity to the rest of the world, including the United States.

But German politicians seem determined to prove their strength by imposing suffering — and politicians around the world are following their lead.

How bad will it be? Will it really be 1937 all over again? I don’t know. What I do know is that economic policy around the world has taken a major wrong turn, and that the odds of a prolonged slump are rising by the day.

June 15, 2010

Ben Bernanke: "We can see what problems can arise in a country if investors lose confidence in the fiscal position of that country, so it is very important that we address this problem."

This problem is being addressed, the democratic consensus of the people is being ignored, money has evacuated the accounts of the masses and the God of finance "The Market" must rule with an iron fist. Confidence in the market is the key to maintaining financial security for those fortunate to have been able to gather great wealth on the backs of the working class; a working class that listened to their financial gurus and steered their savings into 401 K's to accessibility by financial titans who of course will do the right things with it; your will is their command, a great pool of money to do miraculous things for the betterment of mankind. Thank God for "The Market".

The over shadowing reality of the market is….. The Republicans created the deficit, expect the poor and middle class to pay it off while they buy the debt up and sit around the pool collecting the interest. Not only do they sit around the pool waiting for dividend and interest checks but they only pay 15% tax(capital gains). They have a racket going for themselves……….As the average working man kills himself working for shrinking wages and losing 1/4 to 1/3 to taxes the wealthy’s Cosmopolitans and Mai Tais are tasting great in the sun!

Truth is that the market makers and movers are protecting their vested interests, the masses have already contributed all of the cash they are capable of; next, and we are well into that process now is the conversion of your tangible assets, what you consider your life savings, your homes, into cash accessible to "The Market" for a further expansion of the financial royalty's capital assets.

We listen to the right wing purveyors of free enterprise tell us that capital has privilege, it should be free of taxes as it is the generator of investment and the creator of jobs, it is the great mover of civilization forward. If this is so, where are our saviors now, where is that injection of investment that is going to create the jobs so we can march on to a return to normalcy and the masses can again be the drivers of consumer demand and the investors can accumulate their investment returns? Where are these tax free deserving market drivers and job creators, our financial elite, our saviors , those men of men? I hope you are not wasting your time looking for them, they do not exist wearing the mask of a savior. The right wing neocon economic ideals of the free market and privileged capitalism are a fraud, supply side economics as a theory has been thoroughly disproved. The wealth has already shifted upwards, it is OK to throw the masks away and let the cat out of the bag, the masses heads are still spinning and they will never figure out what has hit them. Onward to continued wealth consolidation, forward for the financial royalty.

Onward to where you might ask. Go back and reread paragraph two, onward to sitting around the pool and waiting for the interest and dividend checks and drinking those Cosmopolitans and Mai Tais before they lose their chill. The national debt is next, it has been successfully built up to sustain high returns of interest for a long time to the wealthy who are purchasing it. Treasury notes are a financial titans best friend. The flow of funds through the funnels of the masses has slowed to a trickle, Treasury notes have always been a secure investment, the returns are not the highest but it has always been a strong steady flow, and Republican deficits have shored up the continuation of a steady flow. Flow rate can be worked on, look what has been accomplished with the flow rate of Greek bonds, “naked short selling” can perform wonders, thank God for the elixirs’ of life.

Do you see the picture? Cash flow from the public has slowed, the supply of continued cash flow rests in the future, the national debt, the new cash cow. Your retirement and your children’s and grand-children’s future earnings are being siphoned off NOW by the financial royalists in search for that never ending cash cow. It is wake up time people. The next term to be drilled into your heads is “austerity measures”, this is the new guidelines for your government imposed budget for your own personal life. Cut back, cut back, tighten that belt, no slackers here; the national debt has to be paid! Austerity measures will include the cut back of Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid, not only your children and grand children are expected to pay up but your moms and pops and grandparents are expected to ante up for the payment of the national debt so that interest payments can continue for the sake of an income flow to the financial royalty. How is YOUR income flow doing???

Allen Greenspan frankly told the Wall Street Journal in 1989, that his job as Fed chairman was to maintain a certain amount of “worker insecurity” so there wouldn’t be “wage inflation” - income increases among the middle class. Money and power are placed ahead of human beings, you the old middle class, the working poor will not be heard until you march in legions of tens of thousands and hundreds of thousands. It is wake up and speak up time!

June 14, 2010

All too many union leaders have sold out their members over the years, unions have the same problem as government and Wall Street; anytime massive pools of money exist there will be fingers sneaking into the pie. Unions are the full embodiment of democracy in the work place, in our daily lives if you will. A more responsible suspect attitude on the part of union members is the solution to union boss mismanagement..

Workers, people, died in the early 1900's fighting for the rights to collective bargaining. People hold high reverence for the military dead of this country and deservedly so, that high reverence should be equally bestowed on the deaths of the common man in his fight for a wage to support a decent living, the fighters of the peoples army if you will. Unions gave rise to national labor laws which have all but been ignored by government and industry in the last twenty years, this would not happen with strong unions. The January Supreme court decision giving "corporations" and "unions" decreased election funding restrictions is a major reason for the need for the reemergence of strong unions. I am surprised unions were specified in the ruling, but now unions are our(the working man's) counter balance to complete electoral funding by corporations. The Supreme Court ruling makes it that much more imperative that the working class have some kind of organized representation in the selection of our leaders. Without support for union wages the levels of nonunion wages would never have risen to the height that they did, nonunion workers have benefited by the fight of their union brothers. Now as corporations do everything in their power to drop American wages and the minimum wage workers had better second think unions. I am totally amazed by the turn in attitudes against unions, too much right wing speal is sinking into the wrong heads, it leads me to believe the theories on the dumbing down of Americans.

The economy started it's long decline thirty years ago when Wal Mart moved more and more of it's production to China each year. The trend struck corporate America, right on the balance sheet so the trend was unstoppable, facilitated by changing trade laws the American worker was left high and dry. Ross Perot was right when he said free trade would generate a tremendous sucking sound as industries vacated America. Unions did not drive industry out, greed did, all of a sudden millionaire was not good enough when the plateau of billionaire was so much nicer. Productivity rose tremendously and the American got screwed as his return to his contribution to productivity. Rewards went one way, right into the balance sheets of the corporations and directly into the pockets of CEO's. The only thing redemptive, and redemptive is the wrong word, of the CEO to justify his gross compensation is the CEO's socio-pathology and this should not be rewarded. "The smartest men in the room", bull shit, look what the smartest men in the room did to this country they are dumb like a fox or out right thieves, sociopaths, men without consciences. American business fears the word socialism, well a down trodden working public may come to realize socialism is where it is at. The push back on corporate America will increase as the duration of this downturn continues, I believe it would be in the corporations better interest to deal with unions over a socialized system, something has got to give and the less explosive it is the better for the recovery of this country and corporations had better realize their interests also. Corporations are going to learn the hard way that for them to make money, the American public has to have money also, there is a symbiotic relationship there that they give no thought to. Corporate greed has pushed them ahead 10 steps to now push us all back 5 steps to be lucky to regain those 5 back in 10 years, all this damage to all was not necessary, greed propelled it, now we pay for a learning lesson that will unfortunately pass over the heads of many.

Other countries protect their trade with tariffs, we did from the 1790's through 1980's, then as a country we swallowed the neocon flat earth free trade pill, it has poisoned us and half of the world. Tariff was made a taboo word, Republicans sure know how to do the PR; It is wake up time, force industry back home with tariffs to deal with labor unions and let this country begin to rebuild. At this point I and I would hope a plenitude of Americans would be happy to purchase products 20% more expensive if we are making 40% more. It is time to force industry back, put pride in the union label and get back to the America of post WWII to the 1980's, life may never get better than that for the bulk of Americans but it did work for most. Then with a single salary a man could own his own home, send his children to college, afford health insurance because it was mandated by law in most states as not for profit, and save money for his retirement, life was good then.

Another point to ponder is why is it that labor is always the party to take the hit on rates. We have a situation where American business moved everything to mostly China, if we can coerce them back, we will have an even greater supply of production facilities which of course means low wages. This oversupply is due to managerial decisions to increase profit ratios. Why should it be automatically assumed that labor will take the hit. It is time for a strong reemergence of the expression, "it is a two way street".Let greed driven management take the hit, the American worker has taken it for too long, let profit ratios decline, the already rich can do with less, especially when too many are homeless, fighting starvation, and trying to avoid crime to survive.

Americans had better realize that without sticking together under the umbrella of strong labor unions, life will probably never find a return to our previous norms. Unions were responsible for the rise in living standards after WWII, and fighting today's monopolistic capitalism is going to take organized effort.

Yesterday, I watched Book TV on C-Span. Arthur C. Brooks, president of the American Enterprise Institute was promoting his new book. I do listen to these right wingers, I also very frequently get a real feeling of disgust as these people make serious arguments defending their people with money are the only real people attitudes. Mr. Brooks went on about 30% of the population are against free enterprise and thinks that free enterprise is not fair and expect handouts, to strong applause no less. Mr Brooks went on to call "public sector unions" predatory. Unions are a shining example of democracy in the work place, and these supposedly constitution supporting right wingers tear them down and of course we know why, access to greater wealth for them is far more important than the average Joe making a living wage. If the average Joe had access to decent wages, so called entitlements would have wider funding sources and become less of a burden on society as people would be less dependent on them. As much as right wingers hate "entitlement" programs, what would they have to bitch about without them, their positions are as dependent on spending for the public good as their professed hatred.

The audacity of the right wing mind was displayed openly by a woman who asked him a question. She prefaced her question with " These 30% who are against free enterprise, the blacks and the latinos......"; I could not believe the stupid audacious attitude of this woman on national TV. It is good to see these moments so that one realizes the depth of prejudice not just color oriented but also the depth of class based prejudice. Wealthy right wingers cannot just accept their good fortune and wish the best to everyone else, they have to rub in their self elevated status and show contempt for those less fortunate. They will never admit that the keys of success were handed to most of them and let on that they worked to get where they are at and deserve elevated levels of compensation to distinguish them from the lowly average Joe Blow who refuses to work as hard as they.

Abraham Lincoln: " The Government should create, issue, and circulate all the currency and credits needed to satisfy the spending power of the Government and the buying power of consumers. By the adoption of these principles, the taxpayers will be saved immense sums of interest. Money will cease to be master and become the servant of humanity."

June 13, 2010

It is time for a repost, a very important article that the public must grasp in order to understand the long term condition of our economy and to understand that present short term fixes are just that, short term. The title makes the point strongly enough.."How can President Obama restart an economy that has been moved offshore?"

You have to understand that before we have an economy that works, a real economy, we have to have economic activity that is more than just moving money around from place to place. Moving money is facilitated by those with real money to bolster segments of the economy, bubble creation, into inflationary cycles where the rich will bail out as they sense the asset bubble has run it's expansionary course and drain your cash from the bubble. The production of goods and services is the only real economic engine and that engine has flown the coop to foreign lands.

People have to understand that the Republican principal of "kill the beast" (Google it), is the intentional starvation of the government of funds for the purpose of killing Social Security and Medicare and Medicade. Realize that killing these programs is just a means to an end. The goal is to get people to pay into savings accounts to cover these programs with Wall Street holding the account funds on their books instead of on the governments books. Just what you need, Wall Street taking exorbitant risks with more of your money. The public is already drained of funds from the first bank bailouts to facilitate another.

Let's pray that as people are getting laid off that they are spending some time educating themselves on economic matters. An understanding of how we got where we are is the only way we will be able to turn it around. Republican obstructionism makes no sense unless you can see the big picture. Europe is teetering on the brink of government default, we are teetering on that same brink, corporations and the wealthy royal class will be moving in to "save us" and happily supply us with the new Feudalism. Full blown Fascism is in the future unless people wake up.

Sinclair Lewis makes a good point, "When fascism comes to America, it will be wrapped in the flag and carrying a cross.” What people have to understand about Fascism is that corporations will run all government programs(privatization). We will have the honor of organizations like "Blackwater" now "XE" running our police and security apparatus. Blackwater has shown itself in Iraq to be devoid of all moral and ethical blessings, under no bid contracts they have made a fortune which will gurantee their survivability until the day they can acquire that mega contract of providing a security aparatus for this American nation. Eric Prince the founder of Blackwater is a member of the far religious right, here comes the flags and crosses.

The return of America's manufacturing jobs is KEY to any sense of a return to former normalcy!

______________________________________

From PAUL CRAIG ROBERTS :

Don't Look to Washington for Help

Rule by the Rich

The Democrats were destroyed as an independent party by jobs offshoring and so-called free trade agreements such as NAFTA. The effect of "globalism" has been to destroy the industrial and manufacturing unions, thus leaving the Democrats without a power base and source of funding.

Obama and the Democrats cannot be an opposition party, because Democrats are as dependent as Republicans on corporate interest groups for campaign funding.

The Democrats have to support war and the police state if they want funding from the military/security complex. They have to make the health care bill into a subsidy for private insurance if they want funding from the insurance companies. They have to abandon the American people for the rich banksters if they want funding from the financial lobby.

Jobs offshoring is too profitable for U.S. corporations for Obama to be able to save American jobs and restart the broken economy.

Americans are being squeezed out of health care not only by the loss of job benefits, but also by corporate takeover of medical practice from physicians. Today medical doctors are wage slaves of corporate health providers that leverage doctors by turning them into supervisors of physician assistants, lower paid people without medical degrees who perform the services that doctors once provided. As neither doctor nor physician assistant has any independence, there is no one to represent the patient’s care against the profits of the corporation.

Even environmental concerns are being used to create "cap and trade" rights to buy and sell the ability to pollute. Wall Street is licking its lips over a new source of leveraged derivative instruments.

The American public cannot even get reliable information about their plight as the "mainstream media" has been concentrated into a few corporate hands that do not permit independent reporting. The media is as dependent on corporate money as are politicians.

How can President Obama restart an economy that has been moved offshore? Millions of manufacturing jobs are gone, as are millions of jobs for college graduates, such as software engineering, Information Technology--indeed, any intellectual skill the product of which can be conveyed via the Internet. Even those intellectual skill jobs that do remain in the U.S. are filled increasingly by foreigners brought in on work visas.

The enormous damage done to the U.S. economy by jobs offshoring, work visas, and financial deregulation cannot be offset by government stimulus plans, which expand the debt burdens that are crushing Americans. The federal government’s massive budget deficits and the Federal Reserve’s easy monetary policy are setting the stage for an inflationary depression to follow a deflationary depression.

The Federal Reserve chairman says not to worry about inflation, because the Fed can take the money back out of the economy. But can the Fed take the money out without contracting the economy?

I am a gazebo/deck builder who bought a motorcycle to try to give up the workaholic lifestyle and live again. Very politically interested and very sick about the past criminal administration that has dragged this country down the tubes.